The Principles Of Art

THE

PRINCIPLES OF ART

THE

PRINCIPLES OF ART

R. G. COLLINGWOOD

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

Oxford University Press , Amen House , London E.C.4

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR
CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI ACCRA

FIRST EDITION 1938

REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN

1945, 1947, 2C950, 1955, I960

PREFACE

Thirteen years ago I wrote, at the request of the Clarendon
Press, a small book called Outlines of a Philosophy of Art.
When that book went out of print early in the present year,
I was asked either to revise it for a new edition or to replace
it with another. I chose the latter course, not only because
I have changed my mind on some things in the meantime,
but also because the situation both of art and of aesthetic
theory in this country has changed as well. There has been
at any rate the beginning of what may prove an important
revival in the arts themselves. Fashions which before the
War seemed firmly entrenched, in spite of their obvious
bankruptcy, and which even in 1 924 were only moth-eaten,
and hardly yet even beginning to be replaced by others,
have begun to disappear, and new ones are growing up
instead.

We have in this way a new drama, taking the place of the
old ‘slice of life’ entertainment, in which the author’s chief
business was to represent everyday doings of ordinary people
as the audience believed them to behave, and the actor’s
chief function to take a cigarette from his case, tap it, and
put it between his lips. We have a new poetry, and we have
a new way of painting. We have some very interesting
experiments in a new way of writing prose. These things
are gradually establishing themselves; but they are much
hampered by rags and tatters of moribund theory which still
encumber and intimidate the minds of people who ought to
be welcoming the new developments.

At the same time, we have a new and very lively, if some-
what chaotic, growth of aesthetic theory and criticism,
written mostly not by academic philosophers or amateurs
of art, but by poets, dramatists, painters, and sculptors
themselves. This is the reason for the appearance of the
present book. As long as the theory of art was chiefly
pursued in this country by academic philosophers, I should

vi PREFACE

not have thought it worth my time or my publisher’s money
to write upon it at such length as I have written here. But the
recent development of literature on the subject shows that
artists themselves are now interested in it (a thing which 'in
England has not happened for over a century) ; and it is to
contribute in my own way to this development, and thus
indirectly to the new movement in the arts themselves, that
I publish this work.

For I do not think of aesthetic theory as an attempt to
investigate and expound eternal verities concerning the
nature of an eternal object called Art, but as an attempt to
reach, by thinking, the solution of certain problems arising
out of the situation in which artists find themselves here
and now. Everything written in this book has been written
in the belief that it has a practical bearing, direct or indirect,
upon the condition of art in England in 1937, and in the
hope that artists primarily, and secondarily persons whose
interest in art is lively and sympathetic, will find it of some
use to them. Hardly any space is devoted to criticizing
other people’s aesthetic doctrines; not because I have not
studied them, nor because I have dismissed them as not
worth considering, but because I have something of my own
to say, and think the best service I can do to a reader is to
say it as clearly as I can.

Of the three parts into which it is divided, Book I is
chiefly concerned to say things which any one tolerably
acquainted with artistic work knows already; the purpose of
this being to clear up our minds as to the distinction between
art proper, which is what aesthetic is about, and certain
other things which are different from it but are often called
by the same name. Many false aesthetic theories are fairly
accurate accounts of these other things, and much bad
artistic practice comes from confusing them with art proper.
These errors in theory and practice should disappear when
the distinctions in queStion are properly apprehended.

In this way a preliminary account of art is reached; but
a second difficulty is now encountered. This preliminary

Vll

PREFACE

account, according to the schools of philosophy now most
fashionable in our own country, cannot be true; for it
traverses certain doctrines taught in those schools and there-
fore, according to them, is not so much false as nonsensical.
Book II is therefore devoted to a philosophical exposition of
the terms used in this preliminary account of art, and an
attempt to show that the conceptions they express are
justified in spite of the current prejudice against them; are
indeed logically implied even in the philosophies that
repudiate them.

The preliminary account of art has by now been converted
into a philosophy of art. But a third question remains. Is
this so-called philosophy of art a mere intellectual exercise,
or has it practical consequences bearing on the way in which
we ought to approach the practice of art (whether as artists
or as audience) and hence, because a philosophy of art is a
theory as to the place of art in life as a whole, the practice
of life ? As I have already indicated, the alternative I accept
is the second one. In Book III, therefore, I have tried to
point out some of these practical consequences by suggesting
what kinds of obligation the acceptance of this aesthetic
theory would impose upon artists and audiences, and in
what kinds of way they could be met.

WEST HENDRED, BERKSHIRE

22 September 1937

R. G. C.

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION

§ i. The Two Conditions of an Aesthetic Theory . . i

§ 2. Artist-aestheticians and Philosopher-aestheticians . , 2

§ 3. The Present Situation . . . . . 4

§ 4. History of the word ‘Art’ ..... 5

§ 5. Systematic Ambiguity ..... 7

§ 6. Plan of Book I . . . . -9

BOOK I. ART AND NOT ART

II. ART AND CRAFT

§ 1. The Meaning of Craft . . . . • *5

§ 2. The Technical Theory of Art . . . .17

§3. Break-down of the Theory. . . . .20

§4, Technique . . . . . .26

§ 5. Art as a Psychological Stimulus , . . .29

§ 6. Fine Art and Beauty . . . . • 3^

III. ART AND REPRESENTATION

§1. Representation and Imitation * . . . • 4 2

§ 2. Representative Art and Art Proper . . *43

§ 3. Plato and Aristotle on Representation . . .46

§ 4. Literal and Emotional Representation . . • 5 2

IV. ART AS MAGIC

§ 1. What Magic is not: (i) Pseudo-science . . *57

§ 2. What Magic is not: (ii) Neurosis . . . #62

§ 3. What Magic Is . * * • • ^5

§4. Magical Art . . . * • .69

V. ART AS AMUSEMENT

§ 1. Amusement Art . . . . • * 7 ®

§ 2. Profit and Delight . . • * .82

§ 3. Examples of Amusement Art . . • , • 84

§ 4. Representation and the Critic . . . .88

§ 5. Amusement in the Modern World • *94

VI. ART PROPER: (1) AS EXPRESSION

§ 1. The New Problem . * • * I0 5

§ 2. Expressing Emotion and Arousing Emotion . .109

4436 B

X CONTENTS

§ 3 . Expression and Individualization . , . .in

§ 4. Selection and Aesthetic Emotion . . . .115

§ 5. The Artist and the Ordinary Man . . . .117

§6. The Curse of the Ivory Tower . . . .*119

§ 7. Expressing Emotion and Betraying Emotion . .121

VII. ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

§1. The Problem Defined . . . . .125

§2. Making and Creating . . . . .128

§3. Creation and Imagination . . • . . .130

§4. Imagination and Make-believe . . . . 1 35

§ 5. The Work of Art as Imaginary Object . . . 139

§ 6. The Total Imaginative Experience . . .144

§ 7. Transition to Book II . . . . .151

BOOK II. THE THEORY OF IMAGINATION

VIII. THINKING AND FEELING

§ 1. The Two Contrasted . . . . . 1 57

§ 2. Feeling . . . . . . .160

§ 3. Thinking ....... 164

§ 4. The Problem of Imagination . . . .168

IX. SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

§ r. Terminology . . . . . . x 72

§ 2. History of the Problem: Descartes to Locke . . 174

§3. Berkeley: the Introspection Theory , . . 178

§4. Berkeley: the Relation Theory , . . . 179

§ 5. Hume . . . . . . .182

§6. Kant ....... 186

§7. ‘Illusory Sensa* . . . . . , x88

§8. ‘Appearances’ and ‘Images* . . . .190

§9. Conclusion . . . . . .192

X. IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

§ 1. Imagination as Active . . . , . 195

§ 2. The Traditional Confusion of Sense with Imagination . 198
§ 3. Impressions and Ideas . . 1 . . 202

§4. Attention ....... 203

§ 5. The Modification of Feeling by Consciousness . . 206

§ 6. Consciousness and Imagination , . , .211

§ 7. Consciousness and Truth . , . . .215

§ 8. Summary . . . . . . .221

CONTENTS

xi

XL LANGUAGE

§ i. Symbol and Expression . . . . .225

§ 2. Psychical Expression . . . . .228

§ 3. Imaginative Expression . . . . . 234.

§ 4. Language and Languages . . . . .241

§ 5. Speaker and Hearer . . . . . 247

§6. Language and Thought . . . . .252

§ 7. The Grammatical Analysis of Language . . .254

§ 8. The Logical Analysis of Language . . . , 259

§ 9. Language and Symbolism ..... 268

BOOK III. THE THEORY OF ART

XII. ART AS LANGUAGE

§ 1. Skeleton of a Theory ..... 273
§ 2. Art Proper and Art falsely so called . . . 275

§ 3. Good Art and Bad Art . . . . .280

XIII. ART AND TRUTH

§ 1. Imagination and Truth . . . . .286

§ 2. Art as Theory and Art as Practice . . . .289

§ 3. Art and Intellect . . , . . .292

XIV. THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

§ 1. Externalization . . . . . .300

§ 2. Painting and Seeing . . . . .302

§ 3. The Bodily ‘Work of Art* ..... 305
§ 4. The Audience as Understander .... 308
§ 5. The Audience as Collaborator . . . .311

§ 6. Aesthetic Individualism . . . . . 3 1 5

§ 7. Collaboration between Artists . . . -318

§ 8. Collaboration between Author and Performer . . 320

§ 9. The Artist and his Audience . . . .321

XV. CONCLUSION « 2 c

INDEX

• 337

I

INTRODUCTION

§ x. The Two Conditions of an Aesthetic Theory

The business of this book is to answer the question: Wh at
is art?

A question of thfe kind has to be answered in two stages.
First, we must make sure that the key word (in this case ‘art’)
is a word which we know how to apply where it ought to
be applied and refuse where it ought to be refused. It would
not be much use beginning to argue about the correct
definition of a general term whose instances we could not
recognize when we saw them. Our first business, then, is to
bring ourselves into a position in which we can say with
confidence ‘this and this and this are art; that and that and
that are not art’.

This would be hardly worth insisting upon, but for two
facts : that the word ‘art’ is a word in common use, and that
it is used equivocally. If it had not been a word in common
use, we could have decided for ourselves when to apply it
and when to refuse it. ~ But the problem we are concerned
with is not one that can be approached in that way. It is
one of those problems where what we want to do is to clarify
and systematize ideas we already possess; consequently
there is no point in using words according to a private rule
of our own, we must use them in a way which fits on to
common usage. This again would have been easy, but for
the fact that common usage is ambiguous. The word ‘art’
means several different things ; and we have to decide which
of these usages is the one that interests us. Moreover, the
other usages must not be simply jettisoned as irrelevant.
They are very important for our inquiry; partly because
false theories are generated by failure to distinguish them,
so that in expounding one usage we must give a certain
attention to others; partly because confusion between the

2 INTRODUCTION

various senses of the word may produce bad practice as well
as bad theory. We must therefore review the improper
senses of the word ‘art’ in a careful and systematic way; so
that at the end of it we can say not only ‘that and that and
that are not art’, but ‘that is not art because it is pseudo-art
of kind A ; that, because it is pseudo-art of kind B ; and that,
because it is pseudo-art of kind C’.

Secondly, we must proceed to a definition of the term
‘art’. This comes second, and not first,' because no one can
even try to define a term until he has settled in his own
mind a definite usage of it: no one can define a term in
common use until he has satisfied himself that his personal
usage of it harmonizes with the common usage. Definition
necessarily means defining one thing in terms of something
else; therefore, in order to define any given thing, one must
have in one’s head not only a clear idea of the thing to be
defined, but an equally clear idea of all the other things by
reference to which one defines it. People often go wrong
over this. They think that in order to construct a definition
or (what is the same thing) a ‘theory’ of something, it is
enough to have a clear idea of that one thing. That is
absurd. Having a clear idea of the thing enables them to
recognize it when they see it, just as having a clear idea of
a certain house enables them to recognize it when they are
there; but defining the thing is like explaining where the
house is or pointing out its position on the map; you must
know its relations to other things as well, and if your ideas
of these other things are vague, your definition will be
worthless.

§ 2. Artist-aestheticians and Philosopher-aestheticians

Since any answer to the question ‘What is art?’ must
divide itself into two stages, there are two ways in which it
is liable to go wrong. It may settle the problem of usage
satisfactorily but break down over the problem of definition;
or it may deal competently with the problem of definition
but fail over the problem of usage. These two kinds of

INTRODUCTION 3

failure may be described respectively as knowing what you
are talking about, but talking nonsense; and talking sense
but not knowing what you are talking about. The first kind
gives us a treatment which is well informed and to the point,
but messy and confused ; the second, one which is neat and
tidy, but irrelevant.

People who interest themselves in the philosophy of art
fall roughly into two classes : artists with a leaning towards
philosophy and philosophers with a taste for art. The artist-
aesthetician knows what he is talking about. He can discri-
minate things that are art from things that are pseudo-art, and
can say what these other things are : what it is that prevents
them from being art, and what it is that deceives people into
thinking that they are art. This is art-criticism, which is not
identical with the philosophy of art, but only with the first
of the two stages that go to make it up. It is a perfectly
valid and valuable activity in itself; but the people who are
good at it are not by any means necessarily able to achieve
the second stage and offer a definition of art. All they can do
is to recognize it. This is because they are content with too
vague an idea of the relations in which art stands to things
that are not art: I do not mean the various kinds of pseudo-
art, but things like science, philosophy, and so forth. They
are content to think of these relations as mere differences.
To frame a definition of art, it is necessary to think wherein f
precisely these differences consist. 1 " " '

Philosopher-aestheticians are trained to do well just the
thing that artist-aestheticians do badly. They are admirably
protected against talking nonsense: but there is no security
that they will know what they are talking about. Hence
their theorizing, however competent in itself, is apt to be
vitiated by weakness in its foundation of fact. They are
tempted to evade this difficulty by saying: ‘I do not profess
to be a critic; I am not equal to adjudging the merits of
Mr. Joyce, Mr. Eliot, Miss Sitwell, or Miss Stein; so I will
stick to Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Beethoven.
There is plenty to say about art if one bases it only on the

4 INTRODUCTION

acknowledged classics.’ This would be all right for a critic;
but for a philosopher it will not do. Usage is particular, but
theory is universal, and the truth at which it aims is index
sui et falsi. The aesthetician who claims to know what it is
that makes Shakespeare a poet is tacitly claiming to know
whether Miss Stein is a poet, and if not, why not. The
philosopher-aesthetician who sticks to classical artists is
pretty sure to locate the essence of art not in what makes
them artists but in what makes them classical, that is,
acceptable to the academic mind.

Philosophers’ aesthetic, not having a material criterion
for the truth of theories in their relation to the facts, can
only apply a formal criterion. It can detect logical flaws in
a theory and therefore dismiss it as false; but it can never
acclaim or propound any theory as true. It is wholly un-
constructive; tamquam virgo Deo consecrata , nihil parit. Yet
the fugitive and cloistered virtue of academic aesthetic is not
without its uses, negative though they are. Its dialectic is a
school in which the artist-aesthetician or critic can learn the
lessons that will show him how to advance from art-criticism
to aesthetic theory.

§ 3. The Present Situation

The division between artist-aestheticians and philosopher-
aestheticians corresponds fairly well with the facts as they
stood half a century ago, but not with the facts of to-day.
In the last generation, and increasingly in the last twenty
years, the gulf between these two classes has been bridged
by the appearance of a third class of aesthetic theorists:
poets and painters and sculptors who have taken the trouble
to train themselves in philosophy or psychology or both,
and write not with the airs and graces of an essayist or the
condescension of a hierophant, but with the modesty and
seriousness of a man contributing to a discussion in which
others beside himself are speaking, and out of which he
hopes that truths not yet known even to himself will emerge.

This is one aspect of a profound change in the way in

INTRODUCTION 5

which artists think of themselves and their relation to other
people. In the later nineteenth century the artist walked
among us as a superior being, marked off even by his dress
from common mortals ; too high and ethereal to be questioned
by others, too sure of his superiority to question himself,
and resenting the suggestion that the mysteries of his craft
should be analysed and theorized about by philosophers and
other profane persons. To-day, instead of forming a mutual
admiration society whose serene climate was broken from
time to time by unedifying storms of jealousy, and whose
aloofness from worldly concerns was marred now and then
by scandalous contact with the law, artists go about like other
men, pursuing a business in which they take no more than
a decent pride, and criticizing each other publicly as to their
ways of doing it. In this new soil a new growth of aesthetic
theory has sprung up ; rich in quantity and on the whole high
in quality. It is too soon to write the history of this move-
ment, but not too late to contribute to it; and it is only
because such a movement is going on that a book like this
can be published with some hope of its being read in the
spirit in which it is written.

§ 4. History of the Word ‘Art’

In order to clear up the ambiguities attaching to the word
‘art’, we must look to its history. The aesthetic sense of the
wqfd'i the sense which here concerns us, is very recent in
origin. Art in ancient Latin, like t^xvt) in Greek, means
something quite different. It means a craft or specialized
form of skill, like carpentry or smithying or surgery. The
Greeks and Romans had no conception of what we call art
as something different from craft; what we call art they
regarded merely as a group of crafts, such as the craft of
poetry (Tronyrucfi t^xvt), ars foetica ), which they conceived,
sometimes no doubt with misgivings, as in principle just like ;
carpentry and the rest, and differing from any one of. these
only in the sort of way in which any one of them differs
from any other.;;

6 INTRODUCTION

It is difficult for us to realize this fact, and still more so to
realize its implications. If people have no word for a certain
kind of thing, it is because they are not aware of it as a
distinct kind. Admiring as we do the art of the ancient
Greeks, we naturally suppose that they admired it in the
same kind of spirit as ourselves.'- But we admire it as a kind
of art, where the word ‘art’ carries with it all the subtle and
elaborate implications of the modern European aesthetic
consciousness. We can be perfectly certain that the Greeks
did not admire it in any such way. They approached it from
a different point of view. What this was, we can perhaps
discover by reading what people like Plato wrote about it;
but not without great pains, because the first thing every
modern reader does, when he reads what Plato has to say
about poetry, is to assume that Plato is describing an aesthetic
experience similar to our own. The second thing he does is
to lose his temper because Plato describes it so badly. With
most readers there is no third stage.

Ars in medieval Latin, like ‘art’ in the early modern
English which borrowed both word and sense, meant any
special form of book-learning, such as grammar or logic,
magic or astrology. That is still its meaning in the time of
Shakespeare: ‘lie there, my art’, says Prospero, putting off
his magic gown. But the Renaissance, first in Italy and
then elsewhere, re-established the old meaning; and the
Renaissance artists, like those of the ancient world,' did
actually think of themselves as craftsmen. It was not until
the seventeenth century that the problems and conceptions
of aesthetic began to be disentangled from those of technic
or the philosophy of craft. In the late eighteenth century
the disentanglement had gone so far as to establish a distinc-
tion between the fine arts and the useful arts; where ‘fine’
arts meant, not delicate or highly skilled arts, but ‘beautiful’
arts (les beaux arts , le belle arti , die schSne Kunst). In the
nineteenth century this phrase, abbreviated by leaving out
the epithet and generalized by substituting the singular for
the distributive plural, became ‘art’.

INTRODUCTION 7

At this point the disentanglement of art from craft is
theoretically complete. But only theoretically. The new use
of the word ‘art’ is a flag placed on a hill-top by the first
assailants; it does not prove that the hill-top is effectively
. occupied.

§ 5. Systematic Ambiguity

To make the occupation effective, the ambiguities attach-
ing to the word must be cleared away and its proper meaning
brought to light. The proper meaning of a word (I speak
not of technical terms, which kindly godparents furnish
soon after birth with neat and tidy definitions, but of words
in a living language) is never something upon which the
word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something
over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship’s stern.
Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing
the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull
must be alive when it settles : one must not shoot it and tie it
there.- The way to discover the proper meaning is to ask not,]
‘What do we mean?’ but, ‘What are we trying to mean?*)
And this involves the question ‘What is preventing us from;
meaning what we are trying to mean ?’ J

These impediments, the improper meanings, 'which distract
our minds from the proper one, : are of three kinds. I shall
call them obsolete meanings, analogical meanings, and
courtesy meanings.

The obsolete meanings which every word with a history
is bound to possess are the meanings it once had, and retains
by _force of habit. They form a trail behind the word like
that of a shooting star, and divide themselves according to
their distance from it into more and less obsolete. The very
obsolete are not a danger to the present use of the word;
they are dead and buried, and only the antiquary wishes to
disinter them. But the less obsolete are a very grave danger.
They cling to our minds like drowning men, and so jostle
the present meaning that we can only distinguish it from
them by the most careful analysis.

8 INTRODUCTION

The analogical meanings arise from the fact that when
we want to discuss the experience of other people we can
only do so in our own language. Our own language has
been invented for the purpose of expressing our own ex-
perience. When we use it for discussing other people’s we
assimilate their experience to our own. We cannot talk in
English about the way in which a negro tribe thinks and
; feels without making them appear to think and feel like
Englishmen; we cannot explain to our negro friends in their
own language how Englishmen think and feel without
making it appear to them that we think and feel like them-
selves . 1 Or rather, the assimilation of one kind of experience
to another goes smoothly for a time, but sooner or later a
break comes, as when we try to represent one kind of curve
by means of another. When that happens, the person whose
language is being used thinks that the other has gone more
or less mad. Thus in studying ancient history we use the
word ‘state’ without scruple as a translation of ttoAis. But
the word ‘state’, which comes to us from the Italian Renais-
sance, was invented to express the new secularized political
consciousness of the modern world. The Greeks had no
such experience; their political consciousness was religious
and political in one; so that what they meant by tt6Ais was
something which looks to us like a confusion of Church and
State. We have no words for such a thing, because we do not
possess the thing. When we use for it words like ‘state’,
‘political’, and so forth, we are using them not in their proper
sense, but in an analogical sense.

Courtesy meanings arise from the fact that the things we
give names to are the things we regard as important.
Whatever may be true of scientific technicalities, words in a
.living language are never used without some practical and

1 ‘Let the reader consider an y argument that would utterly demolish all
Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande
modes of thought [which is the same thing as saying, if it were translated
into the Zande language] it would serve to support their entire structure of
belief.’ Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft , Oracles and Magic among the A zande
( I 937 )» PP- 319-20-

INTRODUCTION 9

emotional colouring, which sometimes takes precedence of
its descriptive function. People claim or disclaim such titles
as gentleman, or Christian, or communist, either descriptively,
because they think they have or have not the qualities these
titles connote ; or emotionally, because they wish to possess
or not to possess these qualities, and that irrespectively of
whether they know what they are. The two alternatives are
very far from being mutually exclusive. But when the descrip-
tive motive is overshadowed by the emotional one, the word/
becomes a courtesy title or discourtesy title as the case may be. *

§ 6. Plan of Book I

Applying this to the word ‘art’, we find its proper meaning
hedged about with well-established obsolete, analogical, and
courtesy meanings. The only obsolete meaning of any
importance is that which identifies art with craft. When this
meaning gets tangled up with the proper one, the result is
that special error which I call the technical theory of art:
the theory that art is some kind of craft. The question then,
of course, arises: What kind of craft is it? and here is vast
scope for controversy between rival views as to its differentia.
To that controversy this book will contribute nothing. The
question is not whether art is this or that kind of craft, but
whether it is any kind at all. And I do not propose even to re-
fute the theory that it is some kind of craft. It is not a matter
that stands in need of demonstration. We all know perfectly
well that art is not craft; and all I wish to do is to remind the
reader of the familiar differences which separate the two things. ■

Analogically, we use the word ‘art’ of many things which
in certain ways (important ways, no doubt) resemble what
we call art in our own modern European world, but in
other ways are unlike it. The example which I shall consider
is magical art- I will pause to explain what this means.

When the naturalistic animal-paintings and sculptures of
the upper palaeolithic age were discovered in the last century,
they were hailed as representing a newly found school of art.
Before long, it was realized that this description implied a

10 INTRODUCTION

certain misunderstanding. To call them art implied the
assumption that they were designed and executed with the
same purpose as the modern works from which the name
was extended to them ; and it was found that this assumption
was false. When Mr. John Skeaping, whose manner is
obviously indebted to these palaeolithic predecessors, makes
one of his beautiful animal-drawings, he frames it under
glass, exhibits it in a place of public resort, expects people to
go and look at it, and hopes that somebody will buy it, take
it home, and hang it up to be contemplated and enjoyed by
himself and his friends. All modern theories of art insist
that what a work of art is for is to be thus contemplated.
But when an Aurignacian or Magdalenian painter made
such a drawing he put it where nobody lived, and often
where people could never get near it at all without great
trouble, and on some special occasion; and it appears that
what he expected them to do was to stab it with spears or
shoot arrows at it, after which, when it was defaced, he was
ready to paint another on the top of it.

If Mr. Skeaping hid his drawings in a coal-cellar and
expected anybody who found them to shoot them full of
bullet-holes, aesthetic theorists would say that he was no
artist, because he intended his drawings for consumption,
as targets, and not for contemplation, as works of art. By
the same argument, the palaeolithic paintings are not works
of art, however much they may resemble them : the resem-
blance is superficial; what matters is the purpose, and the
purpose is different. I need not here go into the reasons
which have led archaeologists to decide that the purpose
was magical, and that these paintings were accessories in
some kind of ritual whereby hunters prefigured and so
ensured the death or capture of the animals depicted . 1

A similar magical or religious function is recognizable
elsewhere. The portraits of ancient Egyptian sculpture were

1 English readers who want to go into the question may consult Count
Begouen, ‘The Magical Origin of Prehistoric Art’, in Antiquity, iii (1929),
pp. 5—19, and Baldwin Brown, The Art of the Cave-Dweller (1928).

INTRODUCTION n

not designed for exhibition and contemplation; they were
hidden away in the darkness of the tomb, unvisited, where
no spectator could see them, but where they could do their
magical work, whatever precisely that was, uninterrupted.
Roman portraiture was derived from the images of ancestors
which, keeping watch over the domestic life of their posterity,
had a magical or religious purpose to which their artistic
qualities were subservient. Greek drama and Greek sculpture
began as accessories t>f religious cult. And the entire body of
medieval Christian art shows the same purpose.

The terms ‘art’, ‘artist’, ‘artistic’, and so forth are much
used as courtesy titles. When we consider in bulk the things
which claim them, but, on the whole, claim them without
real justification, it becomes apparent that the thing which
most constantly demands and receives the courtesy title of
art is the thing whose real name is amusement or entertain-
ment. The vast majority of our literature in prose and verse,,
our painting and drawing and sculpture, our music, our,
dancing and acting, and so forth, is quite plainly and often :
quite explicitly designed to amuse, but is called art. Yet we
know that there is a distinction, , The gramophone trade, a
recent one which has the outspokenness of an enfant terrible ,
actually states the distinction, or tries to, in its catalogues.
Nearly all its records are issued frankly as amusement music;
the small remainder is marked off as ‘connoisseur’s records’
or the like. Painters and novelists make the same distinction,
but not so publicly.

This is a fact of great interest for the aesthetic theorist,
because, unless he grasps it, it may debauch his conception of
art itself by causing him to identify art proper with amuse-
ment; and of equal interest to the historian of art, or rather
of civilization as a whole, because it concerns him to under-
stand the place which amusement occupies in relation to art
and to civilization in general.

Our first business, then, is to investigate these three kinds
of art falsely so called. When that has been done, we must
see what there is left to be said about art proper.

BOOK I

ART AND NOT ART

II

ART AND CRAFT
§ i. The Meaning of Craft

The first sense of the word ‘art’ to be distinguished from art
proper is the obsolete sense in which it means what in this
book I shall call craft. This is what ars means in ancient
Latin, and what -ftxvri means in Greek : the power to produce
a preconceived result by means of consciously controlled and
directed action. In order to take the first step towards a
sound aesthetic, it is necessary to disentangle the notion of
craft from that of art proper. In order to do this, again, we
must first enumerate the chief characteristics of craft.

(1) Craft always involves a distinction between means and
end, each clearly conceived as something distinct from the
other but related to it. The term ‘means’ is loosely applied
to things that are used in order to reach the end, such as
tools, machines, or fuel. Strictly, it applies not to the things
but to the actions concerned with them: manipulating the
tools, tending the machines, or burning the fuel. These
actions (as implied by the literal sense of the word means)
are passed through or traversed in order to reach the end, and
are left behind when the end is reached. This may serve to
distinguish the idea of means from two other ideas with
which it is sometimes confused: that of part, and that of
material. The relation of part to vhole is like that of means
to end, in that the part is indispensable to the whole, is what
it is because of its relation to the whole, and may exist by
itself before the whole comes into existence; but when the
whole exists the part exists too, whereas, when the end
exists, the means have ceased to exist. As for the idea of
material, we shall return to that in (4) below.

(2) It involves a distinction between planning and execu-
tion. The result to be obtained is preconceived or thought
out before being arrived at. The craftsman knows what he

wants to make before he makes it. This foreknowledge is
absolutely indispensable to craft: if something, for example
stainless steel, is made without such foreknowledge, the
making of it is not a case of craft but an accident. Moreover,
this foreknowledge is not vague but precise. If a person sets
out to make a table, but conceives the table only vaguely, as
somewhere between two by four feet and three by six, and
between two and three feet high, and so forth, he is no
craftsman. •

(3) Means and end are related in one way in the process
of planning; in the opposite way in the process of execution.
In planning the end is prior to the means. The end is
thought out first, and afterwards the means are thought out.
In execution the means come first, and the end is reached
through them.

(4) There is a distinction between raw material and
finished product or artifact. A craft is always exercised upon
something, and aims at the transformation of this into some-
thing different. That upon which it works begins as raw
material and ends as finished product. The raw material is
found ready made before the special work of the craft begins.

(5) There is a distinction between form and matter. The
matter is what is identical in the raw material and the
finished product; the form is what is different, what the
exercise of the craft changes. To describe the raw material
as raw is not to imply that it is formless, but only that it has
not yet the form which it is to acquire through ‘transforma-
tion’ into finished product.

(6) There is a hierarchical relation between various crafts,
one supplying what another needs, one using what another
provides. There are three kinds of hierarchy: of materials,
of means, and of parts. ( a ) The raw material of one craft is
the finished product of another. Thus the silviculturist pro-
pagates trees and looks after them as they grow, in order to
provide raw material for the felling-men who transform them
into logs ; these are raw material for the saw-mill which trans-
forms them into planks; and these, after a further process

ART AND CRAFT 17

of selection and seasoning, become raw material for a joiner.
(b) In the hierarchy of means, one craft supplies another with
tools. Thus the timber-merchant supplies pit-props to the
miner; the miner supplies coal to the blacksmith; the black-
smith supplies horseshoes to the farmer ; and so on. (c) In the
hierarchy of parts, a complex operation like the manufacture
of a motor-car is parcelled out among a number of trades:
one firm makes the engine, another the gears, another the
chassis, another the* tyres, another the electrical equipment,
and so on; the final assembling is not strictly the manufacture
of the car but only the bringing together of these parts. In
one or more of these ways every craft has a hierarchical
character; either as hierarchically related to other crafts, or
" as itself consisting of various heterogeneous operations hier-
archically related among themselves.

Without claiming that these features together exhaust the
notion of craft, or that each of them separately is peculiar to
it, we may claim with tolerable confidence that where most
of them are absent from a certain activity that activity is not
a craft, and, if it is called by that name, is so called either by
mistake or in a vague and inaccurate way.

§2. The Technical Theory of Art

It was the Greek philosophers who worked out the idea
of craft, and it is in their writings that the above distinctions
have been expounded once for all. The philosophy of craft,
in fact, was one of the greatest and most solid achievements
of the Greek mind, or at any rate of that school, from
Socrates to Aristotle, whose work happens to have been
most completely preserved.

Great discoveries seem to their makers even greater than
they are. A person who has solved one problem is inevitably
led to apply that solution to others. Once the Socratic
school had laid down the main lines of a theory of craft, they
were bound to look for instances of craft in all sorts of likely
and unlikely places. To show how they met this temptation,
here yielding to it and there resisting it, or first yielding to it

1 8 ART AND CRAFT

and then laboriously correcting their error, would need a long
essay. Two brilliant cases of successful resistance may,
however, be mentioned: Plato’s demonstration ( Republic ,
330 D-336 a) that justice is not a craft, with the pendant
(336 E-3 $4 a) that injustice is not one either; and Aristotle’s
rejection ( Meta-physics , A) of the view stated in Plato’s
Timaeus , that the relation between God and the world is a
case of the relation between craftsman and artifact.

When they came to deal with aesthetic problems, however,
both Plato and Aristotle yielded to the temptation. They
took it for granted that poetry, the only art which they dis-
cussed in detail, was a kind of craft, and spoke of this craft
as TronyriKri -rfyvri, poet-craft. What kind of craft was this ?

There are some crafts, like cobbling, carpentering, or
weaving, whose end is to produce a certain type of artifact;
others, like agriculture or stock-breeding or horse-breaking,
whose end is to produce or improve certain non-human
types of organism; others again, like medicine or education
or warfare, whose end is to bring certain human beings into
certain states of body or mind. But we need not ask which
of these is the genus of which poet-craft is a species, because
they are not mutually exclusive. The cobbler or carpenter
or weaver is not simply trying to produce shoes or carts or
cloth. He produces these because there is a demand for
them; that is, they are not ends to him, but means to the end
of satisfying a specific demand. What he is really aiming at
is the production of a certain state of mind in his customers,
the state of having these demands satisfied. The same
analysis applies to the second group. Thus in the end these
three kinds of craft reduce to one. They are all ways of
bringing human beings into certain desired conditions.

The same description is true of poet-craft. The poet
is a kind of skilled producer; he produces for consumers;
and the effect of his skill is to bring about in them certain
states of mind, which are conceived in advance as desirable
states. The poet, like any other kind of craftsman, must
know what effect he is aiming at, and must learn by

ART AND CRAFT r 9

experience and precept, which is only the imparted ex-
perience of others, how to produce it. This is poet-craft, as
conceived by Plato and Aristotle and, following them, such
writers as Horace in his An Poetica. There will be analogous
crafts of painting, sculpture, and so forth; music, at least
for Plato, is not a separate art but is a constituent part of
poetry.

I have gone back to the ancients, because their thought,
in this matter as in so many others, has left permanent traces
on our own, both for good and for ill. There are suggestions
in some of them, especially in Plato, of a quite different view;
but this is the one which they have made familiar, and upon
which both the theory and the practice of the arts has for
the most part rested down to the present time. Present-day
fashions of thought have in some ways even tended to re-
inforce it. We are apt nowadays to think about most
problems, including those of art, in terms either of economics
or of psychology ; and both ways of thinking tend to subsume
the philosophy of art under the philosophy of craft. To the ^
economist, art presents the appearance of a specialized group j >
of industries; the artist is a producer, his audience consumers i
who pay him for benefits ultimately definable in terms of the j
states of mind which his productivity enables them to enjoy, j
To the psychologist, the audience consists of persons reacting j
in certain ways to stimuli provided by the artist; and the ;
artist’s business is to know what reactions are desired or j
desirable, and to provide the stimuli which will elicit them. ,

The technical theory of art is thus by no means a matter
of merely antiquarian interest. It is actually the way in
which most people nowadays think of art; and especially
economists and psychologists, the people to whom we look
(sometimes in vain) for special guidance in the problems of
modern life.

But this theory is simply a vulgar error, as anybody can
see who looks at it with a critical eye. It does not matter
what kind of craft in particular is identified with art. It does
not matter what the benefits are which the artist is regarded

20

ART AND CRAFT
as conferring on his audience, or what the reactions are which
he is supposed to elicit. Irrespectively of such details, our
question is whether art is any kind of craft at all. It is easily
answered by keeping in mind the half-dozen characteristics
of craft enumerated in the preceding section, and asking
whether they fit the case of art. And there must be no chopping
of toes or squeezing of heels ; the fit must be immediate and
convincing. It is better to have no theory of art at all, than
to have one which irks us from the first. .

§ 3. Break-down of the Theory

(x) The first characteristic of craft is the distinction
between means and end. Is this present in works of art?
According to the technical theory, yes. A poem is means
to the production of a certain state of mind in the audience,
as a horseshoe is means to the production of a certain
state of mind in the man whose horse is shod. And the
poem in its turn will be an end to which other things are
means. In the case of the horseshoe, this stage of the analy-
sis is easy: we can enumerate lighting the forge, cutting
a piece of iron off a bar, heating it, and so on. What is there
analogous to these processes in the case of a poem? The
poet may get paper and pen, fill the pen, sit down and square
his elbows; but these actions are preparatory not to com-
position (which may go on in the poet’s head) but to writing.
Suppose the poem is a short one, and composed without the
use of any writing materials; what are the means by which
the poet composes it? I can think of no answer, unless
comic answers are wanted, such as ‘using a rhyming dic-
tionary’, ‘pounding his foot on the floor or wagging his
head or hand to mark the metre’, or ‘getting drunk’. If one
looks at the matter seriously, one sees that the only factors
in the situation are the poet, the poetic labour of his mind,
and the poem. And if any supporter of the technical theory
says ‘Right: then the poetic labour is the means, the poem
the end’, we shall ask him to find a blacksmith who can make
a horseshoe by sheer labour, without forge, anvil, hammer,

ART AND CRAFT 21

or tongs. It is because nothing corresponding to these exists
in the case of the poem that the poem is not an end to which
there are means.

Conversely, is a poem means to the production of a certain
state of mind in an audience ? Suppose a poet had read his
verses . to an audience, hoping that they would produce
a certain result; and suppose the result were different; would
that in itself prove the poem a bad one? It is a difficult
question ; some would say yes, others no. But if poetry were
obviously a craft, the answer would be a prompt and un-
hesitating yes. The advocate of the technical theory must do
a good deal of toe-chopping before he can get his facts to
fit his theory at this point.

So far, the prospects of the technical theory are not too
bright. Let us proceed.]

( 2 ) The distinction between planning and executing cer-
tainly exists in some works of art, namely those which are
also works of craft or artifacts; for there is, of course, an
overlap between these two things, as may be seen by the
example of a building or a jar, which is made to order for
the satisfaction of a specific demand, to serve a useful pur-
pose, but may none the less be a work of art. But suppose
a poet were making up verses as he walked; suddenly finding
a line in his head, and then another, and then dissatisfied
with them and altering them until he had got them to his
liking: what is the plan which he is executing ? He may have
had a vague idea that if he went for a walk he would be able
to compose poetry; but what were, so to speak, the measure-
ments -and specifications of the poem he planned to compose?
He may, no doubt, have been hoping to compose a sonnet
on a particular subject specified by the editor of a review; but
the point is that he may not, and that he is none the less

u- P uj 0r com P osin g without having any definite plan in
his head. Or suppose a sculptor were not making a Madonna
and child, three feet high, in Hoptonwood stone, guaranteed
to placate the chancellor of the diocese and obtain a faculty
for placing it in the vacant niche over a certain church door;

22

ART AND CRAFT
but were simply playing about with clay, and found the clay
under his fingers turning into a little dancing man: is this
not a work of art because it was done without being planned
in advance?

All this is very familiar. There would be no need to insist
upon it, but that the technical theory of art relies on our
forgetting it. While we are thinking of it, let us note the
importance of not over-emphasizing it. Art as such does not
imply the distinction between planning and execution. But

(a) this is a merely negative characteristic, not a positive one.
We must not erect the absence of plan into a positive force
and call it inspiration, or the unconscious, or the like.

(b) It is a permissible characteristic of art, not a compulsory
one. If unplanned works of art are possible, it does not
follow that no planned work is a work of art. That is the
logical fallacy 1 that underlies one, or some, of the various
things called romanticism. It may very well be true that the
only works of art which can be made altogether without
a plan are trifling ones, and that the greatest and most
serious ones always contain an element of planning and
therefore an element of craft. But that would not justify the
technical theory of art.

(3) If neither means and end nor planning and execution
can be distinguished in art proper, there obviously can be
no reversal of order as between means and end, in planning
and execution respectively,

(4) We next come to the distinction between raw material
and finished product. Does this exist in art proper ? If so,
a poem is made out of certain raw material. What is the raw
material out of which Ben Jonson made Queene and Huntress e,

1 It is an example of what I have elsewhere called the fallacy of precarious
margins. Because art and craft overlap, the essence of art is sought not in
the positive characteristics of all art, but in the characteristics of those works
of art which are not works of craft. Thus the only things which are allowed
to be works of art are those marginal examples which lie outside the overlap
of art and craft. This is a precarious margin because further study may at
any moment reveal the characteristics of craft in some of these examples.
See Essay on Philosophical Method.

ART AND CRAFT 33

chaste, and faire ? Words, perhaps. Well, what words?
A smith makes a horseshoe not out of all the iron there is, but
out of a certain piece of iron, cut off a certain bar that he
keeps’ in the corner of the smithy. If Ben Jonson did any-
thing at all like that, he said: ‘I want to make a nice little
hymn to open Act v, Scene vi of Cynthia's Revels. Here is
the English language, or as much of it as I know; I will use
thy five times, to four times, and, bright, excellently , and
goddesse three times each, and so on.’ He did nothing like
this. The words which occur in the poem were never before
his mind as a whole in an order different from that of the
poem, out of which he shuffled them till the poem, as we have
it, appeared. I do not deny that by sorting out the words,
or the vowel sounds, or the consonant sounds, in a poem
like this, we can make interesting and (I believe) important
discoveries about the way in which Ben Jonson’s mind
worked when he made the poem; and I am willing to allow
that the technical theory of art is doing good service if it
leads people to explore these matters; but if it can only
express what it is trying to do by calling these words or
sounds the materials out of which the poem is made, it is
talking nonsense.

But perhaps there is a raw material of another kind: a
feeling or emotion, for example, which is present to the
poet’s mind at the commencement of his labour, and which
that labour converts into the poem. ‘Aus meinem grossen
Schmerzen mach’ ich die kleinen Lieder’, said Heine; and
he was doubtless right; the poet’s labour can be justly
described as converting emotions into poems. But this con-
version is a very different kind of thing from the conversion
of iron into horseshoes. If the two kinds of conversion were
the same, a blacksmith could make horseshoes out of his
desire to pay the rent. The something more, over and above
that desire, which he must have in order to make horseshoes
out of it, is the iron which is their raw material. In the poet’s
case that something more does not exist.

(5) In every work of art there is something which, in

24 ART AND CRAFT

some sense of the word, may be called form. There is, to be
rather more precise, something in the nature of rhythm,
pattern, organization, design, or structure. But it does not
follow that there is a distinction between form and rfiatter.
Where that distinction does exist, namely, in artifacts, the
matter was there in the shape of raw material before the
form was imposed upon it, and the form was there in
the shape of a preconceived plan before being imposed upon
the matter; and as the two coexist iif the finished product
we can see how the matter might have accepted a different
form, or the form have been imposed upon a different
matter. None of these statements applies to a work of art.
Something was no doubt there before a poem came into
being; there was, for example, a confused excitement in the
poet’s mind; but, as we have seen, this was not the raw
material of the poem. There was also, no doubt, the impulse
to write; but this impulse was not the form of the unwritten
poem. And when the poem is written, there is nothing in it
of which we can say, ‘this is a matter which might have taken
on a different form’, or ‘this is a form which might have
been realized in a different matter’.

When people have spoken of matter and form in con-
nexion with art, or of that strange hybrid distinction, form
and content, they have in fact been doing one of two things,
or both confusedly at once. Either they have been assi-
milating a work of art to an artifact, and the artist’s work to
the craftsman’s; or else they have been using these terms
in a vaguely metaphorical way as means of referring to distinc-
tions which really do exist in art, but are of a different kind.
There is always in art a distinction between what is expressed
and that which expresses it; there is a distinction between
the initial impulse to write or paint or compose and the
finished poem or picture or music; there is a distinction
between an emotional element in the artist’s experience and
what may be called an intellectual element. All these deserve
investigation; but none of them is a case of the distinction
between form and matter.

ART AND CRAFT 25

(6) Finally, there is in art nothing which resembles the
hierarchy of crafts, each dictating ends to the one below it,
and providing either means or raw materials or parts to the
one above. When a poet writes verses for a musician to set, -
these verses are not means to the musician’s end, for they
are incorporated in the song which is the musician’s finished
product, and it is characteristic of means, as we saw, to be
left behind. But neither are they raw materials. The musi-
cian does not transform them into music; he sets them to
music; and if the music which he writes for them had a raw
material (which it has not), that raw material could not
consist of verses. What happens is rather that the poet and
musician collaborate to produce a work of art which owes
something to each of them ; and this is true even if in the
poet’s case there was no intention of collaborating.

Aristotle extracted from the notion of a hierarchy of
crafts the notion of a supreme craft, upon which all hierarch-
ical series converged, so that the various ‘goods’ which all
crafts produce played their part, in one way or another, in
preparing for the work of this supreme craft, whose product
could, therefore, be called the ‘supreme good’. 1 At first sight,
one might fancy an echo of this in Wagner’s theory of opera
as the supreme art, supreme because it combines the beauties
of music and poetry and drama, the arts of time and the
arts of space, into a single whole. But, quite apart from the
question whether Wagner’s opinion of opera as the greatest
of the arts is justified, this opinion does not really rest on the
idea of a hierarchy of arts. Words, gestures, music, scenery
are not means to opera, nor yet raw materials of it, but parts
of it; the hierarchies of means and materials may therefore
be ruled out, and only that of parts remains. But even this
does not apply. Wagner thought himself a supremely great
artist because he wrote not only his music but his words,
designed his scenery, and acted as his own producer. This
is the exact opposite of a system like that by which motor-
cars are made, which owes its hierarchical character to the
1 Nicomackean Ethics, beginning: 1094 a i-b 10.

2 6 ART AND CRAFT

fact that the various parts are all made by different firms,

each specializing in work of one kind.

§ 4. Technique

As soon as we take the notion of craft seriously, it is
perfectly obvious that art proper cannot be any kind of craft.
Most people who write about art to-day seem to think that
it is some kind of craft; and this is the main error against
which a modern aesthetic theory mtfst fight. Even those
who do not openly embrace the error itself, embrace doc-
trines implying it. One such doctrine is that of artistic
technique.

The doctrine may be stated as follows. The artist must
have a certain specialized form of skill, which is called
technique. He acquires his skill just as a craftsman does,
partly through personal experience and partly through shar-
ing in the experience of others who thus become his teachers.
The technical skill which he thus acquires does not by itself
make him an artist; for a technician is made, but an artist
is born. Great artistic powers may produce fine works of
art even though technique is defective; and even the most
finished technique will not produce the finest sort of work
in their absence ; but all the same, no work of art whatever
can be produced without some degree of technical skill, and,
other things being equal, the better the technique the better
will be the work of art. The greatest artistic powers, for
their due and proper display, demand a technique as good
in its kind as they are in their own.

All this, properly understood, is very true; and, as a
criticism of the sentimental notion that works of art can be
produced by any one, however little trouble he has taken
to learn his job, provided his heart is in the right place,
very salutary. And since a writer on art is for the most part
addressing himself not to artists, but to amateurs of art, he
does well to insist on what every artist knows, but most
amateurs do not: the vast amount of intelligent and pur-
poseful labour, the painful and conscientious self-discipline,

ART AND CRAFT 27

that has gone to the making of a man who can write a
line as Pope writes it, or knock a single chip off a single
stone like Michelangelo. It is no less true, and no less
important, that the skill here displayed (allowing the
word skill to pass for the moment unchallenged), though a
necessary condition of the best art, is not by itself sufficient
to produce it. A high degree of such skill is shown in
Ben Jonson’s poem; and a critic might, not unfruitfully,
display this skill by analysing the intricate and ingenious
patterns of rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and
dissonance, which the poem contains. But what makes Ben
Jonson a poet, and a great one, is not his skill to construct
such patterns but his imaginative vision of the goddess and
her attendants, for whose expression it was worth his while
to use that skill, and for whose enjoyment it is worth our
while to study the patterns he has constructed. Miss Edith
Sitwell, whose distinction both as poet and critic needs no
commendation, and whose analyses of sound-pattern in
poetry are as brilliant as her own verse, has analysed in this
way the patterns constructed by Mr. T. S. Eliot, and has
written warmly of the skill they exemplify; but when she
wishes conclusively to compare his greatness with the little-
ness of certain other poets who are sometimes ridiculously
fancied his equals, she ceases to praise his technique, and
writes, ‘here we have a man who has talked with fiery angels,
and with angels of a clear light and holy peace, and who has
“walked amongst the lowest of the dead”’. 1 It is this
experience, she would have us understand, that is the heart
of his poetry; it is the ‘enlargement of our experience’ by his
own (a favourite phrase of hers, and one never used without
illumination to her readers) that tells us he is a true poet;
and however necessary it may be that a poet should have
technical skill, he is a poet only in so far as this skill is not
identified with art, but with something used in the service
of art.

This is not the old Greco-Roman theory of poet-craft,
1 Aspects of Modem Poetry , ch. v and p. 251.

28 ART AND CRAFT

but a modified and restricted version of it. When we
examine it, however, we shall find that although it has
moved away from the old poet-craft theory in order to avoid
its errors, it has not moved far enough.

When the poet is described as possessing technical skill,
this means that he possesses something of the same nature
as what goes by that name in the case of a technician proper
or craftsman. It implies that the thing so called in the case
of a poet stands to the production of*his poem as the skill
of a joiner stands to the production of a table. If it does not
mean this, the words are being used in some obscure sense;
either an esoteric sense which people who use them are
deliberately concealing from their readers, or (more prob-
ably) a sense which remains obscure even to themselves.
We will assume that the people who use this language take
it seriously, and wish to abide by its implications.

The craftsman’s skill is his knowledge of the means
necessary to realize a given end, and his mastery of these
means. A joiner making a table shows his skill by knowing
what materials and what tools are needed to make it, and
being able to use these in such a way as to produce the table
exactly as specified.

The theory of poetic technique implies that in the first
place a poet has certain experiences which demand expres-
sion; then he conceives the possibility of a poem in which
they might be expressed; then this poem, as an unachieved
end, demands for its realization the exercise of certain
powers or forms of skill, and these constitute the poet’s
technique. There is an element of truth in this. It is true
that the making of a poem begins in the poet’s having an
experience which demands expression in the form of a poem.
But the description of the unwritten poem as an end to
which his technique is means is false; it implies that before
he has written his poem he knows, and could state, the
specification of it in the kind of way in which a joiner knows
the specification of a table he is about to make. This is always
true of a craftsman; it is therefore true of an artist in those

ART AND CRAFT 29

cases where the work of art is also a work of craft. But it is
wholly untrue of the artist in those cases where the work of
art is not a work of craft; the poet extemporizing his verses,
the sculptor playing with his clay, and so forth. In these
cases (which after all are cases of art, even though possibly
of art at a relatively humble level) the artist has no idea what
the experience is which demands expression until he has
expressed it. What he wants to say is not present to him as
an end towards which’means have to be devised; it becomes
clear to him only as the poem takes shape in his mind, or
the clay in his fingers.

Some relic of this condition survives even in the most
elaborate, most reflective, most highly planned works of art.
That is a problem to which we must return in another
chapter: the problem of reconciling the unreflective spon-
taneity of art in its simplest forms with the massive intel-
lectual burden that is carried by great works of art such as the
Agamemnon or the Divina Commedia. For the present, we
are dealing with a simpler problem. We are confronted
with what professes to be a theory of art in general. To
prove it false we need only show that there are admitted
examples of art to which it does not apply.

In describing the power by which an artist constructs
patterns in words or notes or brush-marks by the name of
technique, therefore, this theory is misdescribing it by
assimilating it to the skill by which a craftsman constructs
appropriate means to a preconceived end. The patterns
are no doubt real ; the power by which the artist constructs
them is no doubt a thing worthy of our attention; but we are
only frustrating our study of it in advance if we approach
it in the determination to treat it as if it were the conscious
working-out of means to the achievement of a conscious
purpose, or in other words technique.

§ 5. Art as a Psychological Stimulus

The modern conception of artistic technique, as stated
or implied in the writings of critics, may be unsuccessful;

4436 D

30 ART AND CRAFT

but it is a serious attempt to overcome the weaknesses of the
old poet-craft theory, by admitting that a work of art as
such is not an artifact, because its creation involves elements
which cannot be subsumed under the conception of craft;
while yet maintaining that there is a grain of truth in that
•theory, because among the elements involved in the creation
of a work of art there is one which can be thus subsumed,
namely, the artist’s technique. We have seen that this will
not do; but at least the people who put it forward have been
working at the subject.

The same cannot be said about another attempt to re-
habilitate the technical theory of art, namely, that of a very
large school of modern psychologists, and of critics who
adopt their way of speaking. Here the entire work of art
is conceived as an artifact, designed (when a sufficient degree
of skill is present to justify the word) as means to the realiza-
tion of an end beyond it, namely, a state of mind in the artist’s
audience. In order to affect his audience in a certain way,
the artist addresses them in a certain manner, by placing
before them a certain work of art. In so far as he is a com-
petent artist, one condition at least is fulfilled: the work of
art does affect them as he intends it should. There is a
second condition which may be fulfilled: the state of mind
thus aroused in them may be in one way or another a valuable
state of mind; one that enriches their lives, and thus gives
him a claim not only on their admiration but also on their
gratitude.

The first thing to notice about this stimulus-and-reaction
theory of art is that it is not new. It is the theory of the tenth
book of Plato’s Republic , of Aristotle’s Poetics , and of
Horace’s Ars Poetica. The psychologists who make use of
it have, knowingly or unknowingly, taken over the poet-
craft doctrine bodily, with no suspicion of the devastating
criticism it has received at the hands of aestheticians in the
last few centuries.

This is not because their views have been based on a study
of Plato and Aristotle, to the neglect of more modern authors.

ART AND CRAFT 31

It is because, like good inductive scientists, they have kept
their eye on the facts, but (a disaster against which inductive
methods afford no protection) the wrong facts. Their theory
of art is based on a study of art falsely so called.

There are numerous cases in which somebody claiming
the title of artist deliberately sets himself to arouse certain
states of mind in his audience. The funny man who lays
himself out to get a laugh has at his command a number of
well-tried methods fop getting it; the purveyor of sob-stuff
is in a similar case; the political or religious orator has a
definite end before him and adopts definite means for
achieving it, and so on. We might even attempt a rough
classification of these ends. 1 First, the ‘artist’s’ purpose may
be to arouse a certain kind of emotion. The emotion may be
of almost any kind ; a more important distinction emerges
according as it is aroused simply for its own sake, as an enjoy-
able experience, or for the sake of its value in the affairs of
practical life. The funny man and the sob-stuff monger fall
on one side in this division, the political and religious orator
on the other. Secondly, the purpose may be to stimulate
certain intellectual activities. These again may be of very
various kinds, but they may be stimulated with either of two
motives: either because the objects upon which they are
directed are thought of as worth understanding, or because
the activities themselves are thought of as worth pursuing,
even though they lead to nothing in the way of knowledge
that is of importance. Thirdly, the purpose may be to
stimulate a certain kind of action; here again with two
kinds of motive: either because the action is conceived as
expedient, or because it is conceived as right.

Here are six kinds of art falsely so called ; called by that
name because they are kinds of craft in which the practi-

1 The reason why I call it a rough classification is because you cannot
really ‘stimulate intellectual activities’, or ‘stimulate certain kinds of action’, \
in a man. Anybody who says you can, has not thought about the conditions!
under which alone these things can arise. Foremost among these conditions j
is this: that they must be absolutely spontaneous. Consequently they cannot
be responses to stimulus.

32 ART AND CRAFT

tioner can by the use of his skill evoke a desired psychological
reaction in his audience, and hence they come under the
obsolete, but not yet dead and buried, conception of poet-
craft, painter-craft, and so forth; falsely so called, b’ecause
the distinction of means and end, upon which every one of
them rests, does not belong to art proper.

Let us give the six their right names. Where an emotion
is aroused for its own sake, as an enjoyable experience, the
craft of arousing it is amusement; where for the sake of its
practical value, magic (the meaning of that word will be
explained in chapter IV). Where intellectual faculties are
stimulated for the mere sake of their exercise, the work
designed to stimulate them is a puzzle; where for the sake
of knowing this or that thing, it is instruction. Where a
certain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which
stimulates it is advertisement or (in the current modern
sense, not the old sense) propaganda; where it is stimulated
as right, exhortation.

These six between them, singly or in combination, pretty
well exhaust the function of whatever in the modern world
wrongfully usurps the name of art. None of them has
anything to do with art proper. This is not because (as
Oscar Wilde said, with his curious talent for just missing a
truth and then giving himself a prize for hitting it) ‘all art
is quite useless’, for it is not; a work of art may very well
amuse, instruct, puzzle, exhort, and so forth, without ceasing
to be art, and in these ways it may be very useful indeed. It is
because, as Oscar Wilde perhaps meant to say, what makes
it art is not the same as what makes it useful. Deciding what
psychological reaction a so-called work of art produces (for
example, asking yourself how a certain poem ‘makes you
feel’) has nothing whatever to do with deciding whether it
is a real work of art or not. Equally irrelevant is the question
what psychological reaction it is meant to produce.

The classification of psychological reactions produced by
poems, pictures, music, or the like is thus not a classification
of kinds of art. It is a classification of kinds of pseudo-art.

ART AND CRAFT 33

But the term ‘pseudo-art’ means something that is not art
but is mistaken for art; and something that is not art can be
mistaken for it only if there is some ground for the mistake :
if the thing mistaken for art is akin to art in such a way that
the mistake easily arises. What must this kinship be ? We
have already seen in the last chapter that there may be a
combination of, for example, art with religion, of such a
kind that the artistic motive, though genuinely present, is
subordinated to the religious. To call the result of such
a combination art, tout court , would be to invite the reply, ‘it
is not art but religion’; that is, the accusation that what is
simply religion is being mistaken for art. But such a mistake
could never in fact be made. What happens is that a com-
bination of art and religion is elliptically called art, and then
characteristics which it possesses not as art but as religion
are mistakenly supposed to belong to it as art.

So here. These various kinds of pseudo-art are in reality
various kinds of use to which art may be put. In order that
any of these purposes may be realized, there must first be
art, and then a subordination of art to some utilitarian end.
Unless a man can write, he cannot write propaganda.
Unless he can draw, he cannot become a comic draughts-
man or an advertisement artist. These activities have in
every case developed through a process having two phases.
First, there is writing or drawing or whatever it may be,
pursued as an art for its own sake, going its own way
and developing its own proper nature, caring for none of
these things. Then this independent and self-sufficient art
is broken, as it were, to the plough, forced aside from its
own original nature and enslaved to the service of an end
not its own. Here lies the peculiar tragedy of the artist’s
position in the modern world. He is heir to a tradition from
which he has learnt what art should be; or at least, what it
cannot be. He has heard its call and devoted himself to its
service. And then, when the time comes for him to demand
of society that it should support him in return for his
devotion to a purpose which, after all, is not his private

34 ART AND CRAFT

purpose but one among the purposes of modern civilization,
he finds that his living is guaranteed only on condition that
he renounces his calling and uses the art which he has ac-
quired in a way which negates its fundamental nature, by
turning journalist or advertisement artist or the like; a
degradation far more frightful than the prostitution or
enslavement of the mere body.

Even in this denatured condition the arts are never
mere means to the ends imposed upon them. For means
rightly so called are devised in relation to the end aimed at;
but here, there must first be literature, drawing, and so
forth, before they can be turned to the purposes described.
Hence it is a fundamental and fatal error to conceive art
itself as a means to any of these ends, even when it is broken
to their service. It is an error much encouraged by modern
tendencies in psychology, and influentially taught at the
present day by persons in a position of academic authority;
but after all, it is only a new version, tricked out in the
borrowed plumage of modern science, of the ancient fallacy
that the arts are kinds of craft.

If it can deceive even its own advocates, that is only
because they waver from one horn of a dilemma to the other.
Their theory admits of two alternatives. Either the stimula-
tion of certain reactions in its audience is the essence of art,
or it is a consequence arising out of its essence in certain
circumstances. Take the first alternative. If art is art only
so far as it stimulates certain reactions, the artist as such is
simply a purveyor of drugs, noxious or wholesome; what
we call works of art are nothing but a section of the Pharma-
copoeia . 1 If we ask on what principle that branch can be
distinguished from others, there can be no answer.

This is not a theory of art. It is not an aesthetic but an
anti-aesthetic. If it is presented as a true account of its
advocates’ experience, we must accept it as such; but with
the implication that its advocates have no aesthetic experience
whatever, or at least none so robust as to leave a mark on
1 Cf. D. G. James, Scepticism and Poetry (1937).

ART AND CRAFT 35

their minds deep enough to be discernible when they turn
their eyes inward and try to recognize its main features . 1
It is, of course, quite possible to look at pictures, listen to
music; and read poetry without getting any aesthetic ex-
perience from these things; and the exposition of this
psychological theory of art may be illustrated by a great
deal of talk about particular works of art; but if this is really
connected with the theory, it is no more to be called art-
criticism or aesthetic- theory than the annual strictures in
The Tailor and Cutter on the ways in which Academy portrait-
painters represent coats and trousers. If it attempts to
develop itself as a method of art-criticism, it can only
(except when it forgets its own principles) rely on anti-
aesthetic standards, as when it tries to estimate the objective
merits of a given poem by tabulating the ‘reactions’ to it of
persons from whom the poet’s name has been concealed,
irrespective of their skill or experience in the difficult busi-
ness of criticizing poetry; or by the number of emotions,
separately capable of being recorded by the psychologist and
severally regarded by him as valuable, which it evokes in a
single hearer.

On this horn of the dilemma art disappears altogether.
The alternative possibility is that the stimulating of certain
reactions should be regarded not as the essence of art but
as a consequence arising in certain conditions out of the
nature of that essence. In that case, art survives the analysis,
but only at the cost of making it irrelevant, as a pharmaco-
logist’s account of the effect of a hitherto unanalysed drug
would be irrelevant to the question of its chemical com-
position. Granted that works of art in certain conditions do
stimulate certain reactions in their audience, which is a fact;
and granted that they do so not because of something other
than their nature as works of art, but because of that nature

1 Dr. I. A. Richards is at present the most distinguished advocate of the
theory I am attacking. I should never say of him that he has no aesthetic
experience. But in his writings he does not discuss it; he only reveals it from
time to time by things he lets slip.

3 6 ART AND CRAFT

itself, which is an error; it will even so not follow that light

is thrown on that nature itself by the study of these reactions.

Psychological science has in fact done nothing towards
explaining the nature of art, however much it has done
towards explaining the nature of certain elements of human
experience with which it may from time to time be asso-
ciated or confused. The contribution of psychology to
pseudo-aesthetic is enormous ; to aesthetic proper it is nil.

ft

§ 6. Fine Art and Beauty

The abandonment of the technical theory of art involves
the abandonment of a certain terminology, which consists
in describing art proper by the name of ‘fine art’. This
terminology implies that there is a genus art, divided into
two species, the ‘useful arts’ and the ‘fine arts’. The ‘useful
arts’ are crafts like metallurgy, weaving, pottery, and so
forth; that is, the phrase means ‘arts (i.e. crafts) devoted to
making what is useful’. This implies that the genus art is
conceived as craft, and that the phrase ‘fine arts’ means
‘crafts devoted to making what is fine, i.e. beautiful’. That
is to say, the terminology in question is intended to commit
any one who uses it to the technical theory of art.

Happily, the term ‘fine art’, except in a few archaic phrases,
is obsolete; but whether this is due to a general repudiation
of the ideas it expresses, or only to the convenience of
abbreviating it into ‘art’, is not so clear. Some of those
ideas, at any rate, do not seem to have died out; and it would
be well to look into them here.

x. The phrase implies that art and manufacture, to use
current modern equivalents for the old terms ‘fine arts’ and
'useful arts’, are species of one genus: both essentially activities
productive of artifacts, but differing in the qualities which
these artifacts are meant to possess. This is an error which
must be eradicated from our minds with all possible care.
In doing this we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that
the business of an artist consists in producing a special kind
of artifacts, so-called ‘works of art’ or objets d’art , which

ART AND CRAFT 37

are bodily and perceptible things (painted canvasses, carved
stones, and so forth). This notion is nothing more nor less
than the technical theory of art itself. We shall have, later on,
to consider in some detail what it is that the artist, as such
and essentially, produces. We shall find that it is two things.
Primarily, it is an ‘internal’ or ‘mental’ thing, something (as
we commonly say) ‘existing in his head’ and there only:'
something of the kind which we commonly call an experience.
Secondarily, it is a bodily or perceptible thing (a picture,
statue, &c.) whose exact relation to this ‘mental’ thing will
need very careful definition. Of these two things, the first
is obviously not anything that can be called a work of art,
if work means something made in the sense in which a
weaver makes cloth. But since it is the thing which the
artist as such primarily produces, I shall argue that we are
entitled to call it ‘the work of art proper’. The second thing,
the bodily and perceptible thing, I shall show to be only
incidental to the first. The making of it is therefore not the
activity in virtue of which a man is an artist, but only a
subsidiary activity, incidental to that. And consequently
this thing is a work of art, not in its own right, but only
because of the relation in which it stands to the ‘mental’
thing or experience of which I spoke just now. There is no
such thing as an objet d' art in itself; if we call any bodily and
perceptible thing by that name or an equivalent we do so only
because of the relation in which it stands to the aesthetic
experience which is the ‘work of art proper’.

2. The phrase ‘fine art’ further implies that the bodily or
perceptible work of art has a peculiarity distinguishing it
from the products of useful art, viz. beauty. This is a
conception which has become very much distorted in the
course of many centuries’ speculation on aesthetic theory,
and we must try to get it straight. The word does not belong
to the English language as such, but to the common speech
of European civilization (le beau , il hello , helium \ the last used
as an equivalent of t6 kccAov). If we go back to the Greek, we
find that there is no connexion at all between beauty and art.

3 8 ART AND CRAFT

Plato has a lot to say about beauty, in which he is only
systematizing what we find implied in the ordinary Greek
use of the word. The beauty of anything is, for him, that
in it which compels us to admire and desire it: to Kaftov is
the proper object of spcos, ‘love’. The theory of beauty is
thus, in Plato, connected not with the theory of poetry or any
other art, but primarily with the theory of sexual love, secondly
with the theory of morals (as that for the sake of which we act
when action is at its highest potency; and Aristotle similarly,
of a noble action, says that it is done ‘for beauty’s sake’, tou
kccAoO 8V£K0c), and thirdly with the theory of knowledge, as
that which lures us onward in the path of philosophy, the
quest of truth. To call a thing beautiful in Greek, whether
ordinary or philosophical Greek, is simply to call it admirable
or excellent or desirable. A poem or painting may certainly
receive the epithet, but only by the same kind of right as a
boot or any other simple artifact. The sandals of Hermes,
for example, are regularly called beautiful by Homer, not
because they are conceived as elegantly designed or decor-
ated, but because they are conceived as jolly good sandals
which enable him to fly as well as walk.

In modern times there has been a determined attempt on
. the part of aesthetic theorists to monopolize the word and
make it stand for that quality in things in virtue of which
; when we contemplate them we enjoy what we recognize as an
aesthetic experience. There is no such quality; and the
word, which is a perfectly respectable word in current usage,
means not what the aesthetic theorists want it to mean but
something quite different and much more like what t6 kocAov
means in Greek. I shall deal with these points in the reverse
order.

(a) The words ‘beauty’, ‘beautiful’, as actually used, have
no aesthetic implication. We speak of a beautiful painting
or statue, but this only means an admirable or excellent one.

I Certainly the total phrase ‘a beautiful statue’ conveys an
implication of aesthetic excellence, but the aesthetic part of
this implication is conveyed not by the word ‘beautiful’ but

ART AND CRAFT 39

by the word ‘statue*. The word ‘beautiful* is used in such a
case no otherwise than as it is used in such phrases as ‘a
beautiful demonstration’ in mathematics or ‘a beautiful
stroke’ at billiards. These phrases do not express an aesthetic
attitude in the person who uses them towards the stroke or
the demonstration; they express an attitude of admiration
for a thing well done, irrespective of whether that thing
is an aesthetic activity, an intellectual activity, or a bodily
activity. •

We speak of things as beautiful, with no less frequency
and no less accuracy, when their excellence is one that appeals
only to our senses : a beautiful saddle of mutton or a beautiful
claret. Or when their excellence is that of well-devised and
well-made means to an end : a beautiful watch or a beautiful
theodolite. 'When we speak of natural things as beautiful,
it may, of course, be with reference to the aesthetic experi-
ences which we sometimes enjoy in connexion with mem;
for we do enjoy such experiences in connexion with natural
objects, as we enjoy them in connexion with objets d'art , and,
I think, enjoy them in both cases in precisely the same way.
But it need not be with reference to aesthetic experience; it
may equally well be with reference to the satisfaction of some
desire or the arousing of some emotion. A beautiful woman
ordinarily means one whom we find sexually desirable; a
beautiful day, one which gives us the kind of weather we
need for some purpose or other, or just for some reason like;
a beautiful sunset or a beautiful night, one that fills us with
certain emotions, and we have seen that such emotional
reactions have nothing to do with aesthetic merit. The
question was acutely raised by Kant, how far our attitude
towards the song of a bird is an aesthetic one, and how far
it is a feeling of sympathy towards a little fellow creature.
Certainly we often call our fellow creatures beautiful by
way of saying that we love them, and that not only sexually.
The bright eyes of a mouse or the fragile vitality of a flower
are things that touch us to the heart, but they touch us with
the love that life feels for life, not with a judgement of their

4 o ART AND CRAFT

aesthetic excellence. A very great deal of what we express by
calling natural things beautiful has nothing whatever to do
with aesthetic experience. It has to do with that other kind of
experience which Plato called Ipcos.

Modern aestheticians who want to connect the idea of
beauty with the idea of art will say to all this either that the
word is ‘correctly’ used when it is used in connexion with
aesthetic experience and ‘incorrectly’ on other occasions, or
that it is ‘ambiguous’, having both an aesthetic use and a non-
aesthetic. Neither position is tenable. The first is one of
those all too frequent attempts on the part of philosophers
to justify their own misuse of a word by ordering others to
misuse it in the same way. We ought not, they say, to call a
grilled steak beautiful. But why not ? Because they want us
to let them monopolize the word for their own purposes.
Well, it does not matter to anybody but themselves, because
nobody will obey them. But it matters to themselves, because
the purpose for which they want it, as we shall see in the next
paragraph, is to talk nonsense. The second alternative is
simply untrue. There is no ambiguity. The word ‘beauty’,
wherever and however it is used, connotes that in things by
virtue of which we love them, admire them, or desire them.

(b) When these aestheticians want to use the word as a
name for the quality in things by virtue of which we enjoy
an aesthetic experience in connexion with them, they want
to use it as a name for something non-existent. There is no
such quality. The aesthetic experience is an autonomous
activity. It arises from within ; it is not a specific reaction
to a stimulus proceeding from a specific type of external
object. 'Some of those who want to use the word ‘beauty’ in
this way are quite aware of this, and indeed preach it as a
doctrine under the name of the subjectivity of beauty; not
realizing that if this doctrine is accepted their own motive
for wresting the word ‘beauty’ from its proper sense disap-
pears.\ For to say that beauty is subjective means that the
aesthetic experiences which we enjoy in connexion with
certain things arise not from any quality that they possess,

ART AND CRAFT 41

which if they did possess it would be called beauty, but
from our own aesthetic activity.

To sum up : aesthetic theory is the theory not of beauty
but of art. The theory of beauty, if instead of being brought
(as it rightly was by Plato) into connexion with the theory
of love it is brought into connexion with aesthetic theory, is
merely an attempt to construct an aesthetic on a ‘realistic’
basis, that is, to explain away the aesthetic activity by appeal
to a supposed quality of the things with which, in that
experience, we are in contact; this supposed quality, invented
to explain the activity, being in fact nothing but the activity
itself, falsely located not in the agent but in his external
world.

Ill

ART AND REPRESENTATION

§ l. Representation and Imitation

If art proper is not any kind of craft, it cannot be repre-
sentative. For representation is a matter of skill, a craft of a
special kind. If the last chapter has established the bank-
ruptcy of the technical theory of art, the present chapter is in
logical strictness unnecessary, for its purpose will be to
demonstrate that art proper is not and cannot be represen-
tative. But the idea of representation has played too im-
portant a part in the history of aesthetic to permit this
summary treatment. I therefore propose to waive the above
argument, forget the relation between representation and
craft, and treat the representational theory of art as if it were
a separate theory. As a matter of fact, most of what was
written and said about art in the nineteenth century was
written and said, not about art proper, but about represen-
tation ; with the assumption, of course, that it was for that
reason about art. Serious artists and critics are trying in
these days to go behind that assumption; but they are
finding it very difficult, because the general public has by
now learnt to take the same assumption as gospel truth. Let
that fact, then, serve to justify the publication of this chapter.

Representation must be distinguished from imitation. A
work of art is imitative in virtue of its relation to another
work of art which affords it a model of artistic excellence;
it is representative in virtue of its relation to something in
‘nature’, that is, something not a work of art.

Imitation also is a craft; and therefore a so-called work of
art, in so far as it is imitative, is a work of art falsely so called.
At the present time there is little need to insist on this.
Plenty of people paint and write and compose in a spirit of
the purest imitation, and make a name for themselves as
painters or writers or musicians solely owing to their success

ART AND REPRESENTATION 43

in copying the manner of some one whose reputation is
assured; but both they and their public know that in so far
as their work is of this kind it is a sham, and it would be a
waste’ of our time to prove it. The opposite thesis would be
better worth developing. Originality in art, meaning lack of
resemblance to anything that has been done before, is some-
times nowadays regarded as an artistic merit. This, of course,
is absurd. If the production of something deliberately
designed to be like existing works of art is mere craft, equally
so, and for the same reason, is the production of something
designed to be unlike them. There is a sense in which any
genuine work of art is original ; but originality in that sense
does not mean unlikeness to other works of art. It is a name
for the fact that this work of art is a work of art and not
anything else.

§ 2. Representative Art and Art Proper

The doctrine that all art is representative is a doctrine
commonly attributed to Plato and Aristotle 1 ; and something
like it was actually held by theorists of the Renaissance and
the seventeenth century. Later, it was generally maintained
that some kinds of art were representative and others not.
To-day, the only tolerable view is that no art is representative.
At any rate, this is the view of most artists and critics whose
opinion is worth taking; but what exactly is asserted and
what exactly denied by people who express it, nobody quite
knows.

The view that art proper is not representative, which is
the view here maintained, does not imply that art and
representation are incompatible. As in the case of art and
craft, they overlap. A building or a cup, which is primarily
an artifact or product of craft, may be also a work of art; but
what makes it a work of art is different from what makes it
an artifact. A representation may be a work of art; but what
makes it a representation is one thing, what makes it a work
of art is another.

1 But falsely attributed. See the following Section.

44 ART AND REPRESENTATION

A portrait, for example, is a work of representation. What
the patron demands is a good likeness; and that is what the
painter aims, and successfully, if he is a competent painter,
at producing. It is not a difficult thing to do; and we may
reasonably assume that in portraits by great painters such
as Raphael, Titian, Velazquez, or Rembrandt it has been
done. But, however reasonable the assumption may be, it
is an assumption and nothing more. The sitters are dead
and gone, and we cannot check the likeness for ourselves.
If, therefore, the only kind of merit a portrait could have
were its likeness to the sitter, we could not possibly
distinguish, except where the sitter is still alive and
unchanged, between a good portrait and a bad. I knew a
wealthy art-collector who would never collect portraits,
for this very reason. He maintained that since the business
of a portrait-painter was to produce a likeness, there
was no way of distinguishing a good portrait from a
bad when once the sitter was dead. He was a very good
stockbroker.

None the less, we do distinguish ; and our ability to do so
is due to the fact that although, in ordering a portrait, the
patron is ordering not a work of art but a likeness, the
painter in supplying his demand may have given him more
than be bargained for: a likeness and a work of art as well.
Of course, in one sense, every portrait must be a work of art.
We have already seen how in the advertisement artist there
is an artistic motive present, but ‘denatured’ and subordinated
to an end which, being alien to the artist as such, is from the
artistic point of view a base end. The portrait-painter is in
the same case. He must first of all be an artist before he can
subordinate his artistic powers to the end of portraiture.
Where the subordination is complete, the portrait-painter
has satisfied his patron’s demand for a good likeness, but
has sacrificed his life as an artist in doing so. Thus a com-
mercial portrait, such as most of those one sees on the walls of
exhibitions, is in one sense a work of art and in one sense not
a work of art: it is a work in which artistic motives are

ART AND REPRESENTATION 45

genuinely present, but denatured by subordination to a non-
artistic end, the end of representation.

In calling a portrait a work of art we mean something
more than this. We mean that in addition to the artistry
which the painter has subordinated to the business of pro-
ducing a likeness, there is a further artistry which has risen
superior to that business. First of all, the painter has used
the fact that he can paint as means to the production of a
likeness; then he has. used the fact that he is producing a
likeness as an opportunity for producing a work of art.
There is no need for the reader to puzzle his head over this
statement. Either he knows what I am talking about or he
does not. If he can detect for himself the difference between
a commercial portrait, intended simply to satisfy a patron’s
demand for a good likeness, such as those by the well-known
artists Mr. A and Mr. B, and a portrait in which the artistic
motive has triumphed over the representational, like those
by Mr. X and Mr. Y, we can get ahead. If he cannot, he
lacks the experience on which the writer of a book like this
is asking him to reflect.

What is here said of a portrait or representation of an
individual human being applies equally to representations of
other individuals, such as Snowdon from Capel Curig, the
Thames at Pangbourne, or the Death of Nelson. And it
makes no difference (as we shall see later on) whether the
individual is historically or topographically ‘real’, like
Nelson or Snowdon, or ‘imaginary’, like Mr. Tobias Shandy
or Jacob’s Room.

It makes no difference, again, whether the representation
is individualized or generalized. A portrait aims at in-
dividualized representation; but Aristotle in the case of
drama and Sir Joshua Reynolds in the case of painting have
pointed out (quite correctly, in spite of Ruskin’s disapproval)
that there is such a thing as generalizing representation. The
patron who buys a picture of a fox-hunt or a covey of par-
tridges does not buy it because it represents that fox-hunt
or that covey and not another ; he buys it because it represents

4436 E

46 ART AND REPRESENTATION

a thing of that kind. And the painter who caters for that mar-
ket is quite aware of this, and makes his covey or his fox-hunt a
‘typical’ one, that is, he represents what Aristotle called ‘the
universal’. Ruskin thought that generalizing representation
could never produce good art; but it can; not because it is re-
presentation, nor because it is generalizing representation, but
because it can be raised to the level of art proper through being
handled by a real artist. Even Ruskin could see this where
Turner was concerned. The prejudice which he expressed
against generalizing representation was merely a typical
piece of English nineteenth-century romanticism, attempting
to dislodge the ‘universal’ out of art in order to dissociate art
from the intellect, whose influence on art was supposed to
make it frigid, unemotional, and therefore inartistic.

§ 3. Plato and Aristotle on Representation

Most modern writers on aesthetics attribute to Plato the
syllogism ‘imitation is bad; all art is imitative; therefore all
art is bad’, where imitation means what I am here calling
representation. Hence, they go on, Plato ‘banishes art from
his city’. I will not document my assertion. There is no need
to pillory a few offenders for a crime that is almost universal. 1

This Platonic ‘attack on art’ is a myth whose vitality
throws a lurid light on the scholarship of those who have
invented and perpetuated it. The facts are (i) that ‘Socrates’
in Plato’s Republic divides poetry into two kinds, one repre-
sentative and the other not (392 d); (ii) that he regards
certain kinds of representative poetry as amusing (f)2t0s) but
for various reasons undesirable, and banishes these kinds
only of representative poetry not merely from the schoolroom
of his young guardians but from the entire city (398 a); (iii)
that later in the dialogue he expresses satisfaction with his
original division (595 a); (iv) reinforces his attack, this time

1 I am involved in it myself; see an article on ‘Plato’s Philosophy of Art’,
in Mind, n.s. xxxiv, 1 54-72. It is especially an English error, and goes back
at least to Jowett’s translation of Plato (1872). Outside England it has in-
fected Croce; I suspect, through Bosanquet’s History of Aesthetic.

ART AND REPRESENTATION 47

extended to the entire field of representative poetry, with
new arguments (595 c-606 d); (v) and banishes all repre-
sentative poetry, but retains certain specified kinds of poetry
as not' representative (607 a).

It is, of course, anachronistic to attribute to Plato the
modern conception of ‘art’, or any views that involve this
conception. He is writing not about art but about poetry,
with painting brought in by the way for purposes of illustra-
tion. But this is not what I complain of. Substitute ‘poetry’
for ‘art’ in the first paragraph above, and the statements will
still be altogether untrue.

The myth about Plato’s banishing the artist (or poet)
from his ideal city is derived from a misunderstanding of
Republic , 398 a: ‘We should reverence him as something
holy and marvellous and delightful : we should tell him that
there is not any one like him in our city — and that there is
not allowed to be; and we should anoint him with myrrh
and crown him with a diadem and send him away to another
city, and for our own part continue to employ for our
welfare’s sake a drier and less amusing poet and story-teller,
who. should represent to us the discourse of a good man.’
The misinterpreters of Plato assure us that the victim of this
banishment is the poet as such. If they had read the sentence
to the end as I have quoted it, they would have seen that he
could not be that; he must be some one kind of poet; and
if they had remembered what went before, they would realize
what kind of poet he was : not even the representative poet
as such, but the entertainer who (admittedly with marvellous
skill and very amusingly) represents trivial or disgusting
things : the kind of person who makes farm-yard noises and
the like (396 b). At this stage of the argument (Book III)
not only some kinds of poet, but even some kinds of repre-
sentative poet, are explicitly retained in the city: namely,
those who ‘represent the discourse of a good man’.

In the tenth book Plato’s position has changed. But it
has not changed in the direction of regarding all poetry as
representative. The change is that whereas in Book III some

4 8 ART AND REPRESENTATION

representative poetry is banished because what it represents
is trivial or evil, in Book X all representative poetry is
banished because it is representative. This is clear from the
first few lines of the book, where Socrates congratulates
himself on having decided ‘to banish all such poetry as is
representative’ (to pqlhapQ Trapa2,sx£o0ai auTfjs ocrr| ninTynwfj).
It never entered Plato’s head that any reader could think this
implied the banishment of all poetry; for when (607 a)
Socrates says ‘the only kind of poetry we must admit is
hymns to the gods and praises of good men’, no character is
made to protest: ‘But was not all poetry to be excluded?’

Tragedy and comedy were kinds of poetry which Plato
classified as representative. When he wrote Book III, it
seems that he intended to admit into his republic a certain
kind of drama, more or less Aeschylean, I suppose, in
character. When he wrote Book X, his view had hardened.
All drama must go, and he finds himself left with that
kind of poetry whose chief representative is Pindar.

If any one will read the first half of Book X 1 2 with an un-
prejudiced eye, he will see that Plato never tells his reader
either that he wishes to attack all forms of poetry, or that
he regards poetry in general as representative. He will see
that, about fifty times over, Plato uses the verb umetcr8ai,
‘represent’, or some cognate word with especial care so as
never to let the reader forget that he is discussing repre-
sentative poetry only, and not poetry in general. 3 He

1 In Greek; for our translations are not to be trusted. For example,
in a recent translation b) r a high authority, he will find the sentence oO h£vtoi
Treo t6 ys u^yicrrov KcrrnyopriKausv oCrrfis (605 c: ‘we have not yet stated our
chief accusation against it’, i.e. against representation; for the whole context
is about u(im«ns, cf. the phrase t6v iniurnie&v Trovryn'iv 605 b, seven lines
above), mistranslated ‘we have not yet brought our chief count against poetry’,
as if oCrrfis referred to some mention, in the context, of Trotiynia'j in general.

2 In a very few passages, it is true, Plato writes of ‘poets’ or ‘poetry’ without
the express qualification ‘representative’, although the sense might seem to

require it (e.g. 600 e 5, 601 a 4, 606 a 6, and especially 607 b 2, 6). In every
case except one, the qualification is obviously implied in the context. The one
exception (607 b 6), though a very interesting passage, is not one that affects
the present discussion.

ART AND REPRESENTATION 49

will see that the elaborate attack on Homer is directed
against him not as the king of poets in general but against
him as the king of tragedians (this is emphasized once at the
beginning of the attack and again at the end: 598 d, t(\v ts
Tpaycp2uav Kai t6v fiyepova aCrrfft "Opripov: 607 a, "Opqpov
TTOiTynKcbTOcrov slvai Kai irpcoxov tcov Tpay coZotto icov) . He will
see that a distinction is carefully made between the repre-
sentative poet and the ‘good’ poet (598 e, t6v &yoc9ov -rroiTyn'iv
. . . sl26Ta apa iroiei>7, by contrast with pipiyifis; the next
sentence, explaining that what the dyocQos Trouynte does is to
‘discourse’, makes it clear that the good Troiiyrfis who is
contrasted with the ‘representer’ here means not a good
craftsman or artisan but a good poet. In 605 d, agairi, it is
said that when Homer or a tragedian causes us to bewail the
misfortune of the hero he represents, we praise him ‘as a
good poet’ ; but this, Socrates goes on (605 e), is undeserved
praise). Finally, he will see that at the end of the whole
argument, when Socrates seems half to relent and promises
to hear with sympathy whatever can be said in defence of the
accused, the old distinction is still insisted upon : the accused
is never poetry, but ‘poetry for pleasure’s sake, i.e. repre-
sentation’ (f) Trpos f)2kOVflV TTOtT)TlKTJ KCtl T| |Jl(pr|CTlS, 607 c;
‘poetry of this kind’ Tfft xoiccOrris -rroifioscos, 607 e).

I am not defending Plato or reading into him my own
aesthetic doctrines. I think that in fact he was guilty of a
serious confusion in identifying representative poetry with
amusement poetry, whereas amusement art is only one kind
of representative art, the other kind being magical art.
What Plato wanted to do, as I shall explain in the fifth
chapter, was to put the clock back and revert from the
amusement art of the Greek decadence to the magical art
of the archaic period and the fifth century. But by attacking
representative poetry he was using the wrong means for
effecting this result (if, indeed, it co'uld have been effected
at all). He did not apply the Socratic method with enough
vigour; had he done so, he would have pulled himself up
with the question, ‘How can I discuss representative poetry

5 o ART AND REPRESENTATION

(ths iroit'iCTecos ooti pig.r)TiKri) before I have made up my mind

what poetry is in itself?’

This failure to raise the fundamental question no doubt
partly explains why Plato’s argument has been so widely
and so completely misunderstood. But it does not explain
the misunderstanding entirely, still less excuse it. The
reason why modern readers have taken Plato’s attack on
representative amusement poetry (f) -rrpos f|2ovfiv TTOiiynKTi
Kcd f) ufuqcns) for an attack on poetry as.such is that their own
minds are fogged by a theory — the current vulgar theory —
identifying art as such with representation. Bringing this
theory with them to Plato’s text, they read it into that text
in spite of all that Plato can do to prevent them.

As long as this current vulgar theory dominates the minds
of classical scholars, it is no use expecting them to under-
stand what it really is that Plato is saying. But that is no
reason why a protest should not be made against what has
become a crying scandal in the world of classical scholarship.

The reader will perhaps wish to ask, What of Aristotle?
Did not he think of art as essentially representative ?

He makes it clear at the beginning of the Poetics that he
did not. He there accepts Plato’s familiar distinction be-
tween representative and non-representative art; maintaining,
for example, that some kinds of music are representative but
not all. It is true that he does not altogether follow Plato as to
where the line between them should be drawn. In the case of
poetry he regards one kind (dithyramb) as representative
which Plato had classified as non-representative, and one
(epic) as wholly representative which Plato had classified as
representative only in part. But he agrees with Plato that
.drama is representative; that the function of representative
art is to arouse emotion; and that therefore drama is essem
itially a means of arousing emotion. In the case of tragedy,
this emotion is a combination of pity and fear. He further
agreed with Plato in thinking that the emotions aroused in
the mind of a spectator by a dramatic performance are
emotions of a kind which (at any rate in the violent degree to

ART AND REPRESENTATION 51

which they are aroused in the theatre) impede the due per-
formance of everyday activities. He nevertheless deliber-
ately took upon himself the task which Socrates had left, in
Re-public 607 d, to ‘her champions, men who are not poets but
lovers of poetry — the task of speaking on her behalf in prose
and arguing that she is not only pleasant but wholesome for
a city and for the life of man’. ‘She’ here, as the context
shows, is not poetry but ‘poetry for pleasure’s sake, that is,
representation’ (607 c). Aristotle is claiming the place of
such a champion, and the Poetics (or rather, that small part of
it which is something more than a set of hints to amateur
playwrights) is offered as the prose speech Socrates asked for.

The Poetics is therefore in no sense a Defence of Poetry;
it is a Defence of Poetry for Pleasure’s Sake, or Representa-
tive Poetry. The method is a simple and familiar one. The
defence admits all the facts alleged by the prosecution, but
turns them to the accused’s credit. This is effected by
carrying the psychological analysis of the effect of amuse-
ment art on its audience one stage further, beyond the point
where Plato had left it. Tragedy generates in the audience
emotions of pity and fear. A mind heavily charged with
these emotions is thereby unfitted for practical life. So far
Aristotle and Plato are in agreement. Plato proceeds at once
to his conclusion: therefore tragedy is detrimental to the
practical life of its audience. (The reader will remember
that the argument was never intended to concern itself with
tragedy in its religious or magical form, to which it would be
wholly irrelevant, still less with tragedy as a form of art
proper: but only with tragedy as a form of amusement.)
Aristotle inserts one further step in the analysis. The
emotions generated by tragedy, he observes, are not in fact
allowed to remain burdening the mind of the audience.
They are discharged in the experience of watching the
tragedy. This emotional defecation or ‘purging’ (KocSapais)
leaves the audience’s mind, after the tragedy is over, not
loaded with pity and fear but lightened of them. The effect
is thus the opposite of what Plato had supposed.

52 ART AND REPRESENTATION

Aristotle’s analysis is perfectly correct and highly
important, though (of course) not as a contribution to the
theory of art, but as a contribution to the theory of amuse-
ment. But whether he has answered Plato’s real objections
to amusement art is another question altogether. Plato’s dis-
.cussion of amusement art is only an incident in the Republic
as a whole. The Republic deals with a vast variety of subjects ;
but it is not an encyclopaedia or a summa ; it is concentrated
upon a single problem, and the various subjects it deals with
are brought in and discussed only so far as they illuminate
that problem. The problem is the decadence of the Greek
world: its symptoms, its causes, and its possible remedies.
Among its symptoms, as Plato rightly contended, was the
supersession of the old magico-religious art by a new amuse-
ment art. Plato’s discussion of poetry is rooted in a lively
sense of realities: he knows the difference between the old
art and the new — the kind of difference that there is between
the Olympia pediments and Praxiteles — and he is trying to
analyse it. His analysis is imperfect. He thinks that the new
art of the decadence is the art of an over-excited, over-
emotionalized world; but it is really the exact opposite.
It is really the ‘art’ of an emotionally defecated world, a
world whose inhabitants feel it flat and stale. The art, in fact,
of a Waste Land. Aristotle, with another generation’s ex-
perience of the fourth century to instruct him, corrects
Plato on the facts. But he has lost Plato’s sense of their signifi-
cance. He no longer feels the contrast between the greatness
of the fifth century and the decadence of the fourth. Plato,
on the threshold of Greece’s decay, looks forward propheti-
cally into the gloom and throws all the energies of his heroic
mind into the task of averting it. Aristotle, a native of the
new Hellenistic world, sees no gloom. But it is there. / /

§ 4. Literal and Emotional Representation

Let us look back at the case of a portrait, from which we
started. What is the patron demanding, and what is the
painter supplying, under the name of. a ‘good likeness’ ? It

ART AND REPRESENTATION S3

is generally supposed that to speak of a painting as like the
original means that the painting, as a pattern of colours,
resembles the pattern of colours that appears to a person
lookin'g at the original. But this is not at all what is meant.

The true definition of representative art is not that
the artifact resembles an original (in which case I call the
representation literal), but that the feeling, evoked by the
artifact resembles the feeling evoked by the original (I call;
this emotional representation). When a portrait is said to be
like the sitter, what is meant is that the spectator, when he
looks at the portrait, ‘feels as if he were in the sitter’s
presence. This is what the representative artist as such is
aiming at. He knows how he wants to make his audience
feel, and he constructs his artifact in such a way that it will
make them feel like that. Up to a point, this is done by repre-
senting the object literally, but beyond that point it is done
by skilful departure from literal representation. The skill in
question, like any other form of skill, is a matter of devising
means to a given end, and is acquired empirically, by observ-
ing how certain artifacts affect certain audiences, and thus
through experience (which may in part be other people’s ex-
perience communicated by instruction) becoming able to pro-
duce in one’s audience the kind of effect one wants to produce.

It is, therefore, not a mark of incompetence in the repre-
sentative artist that his works are not literally exact copies of
their originals. Had that been so, the camera would have
beaten the portrait-painter on his own ground; whereas the
reverse is the case; photographic portraits are always more
or less ‘faked’ on principles borrowed from the portrait-
painter. For the portrait-painter does not want to produce
a literal likeness . 1 He deliberately leaves out some things
that he sees, modifies others, and introduces some which he

1 This point has been well put by Van Gogh. ‘Dis a Serret queje serais
disespiri si mes figures itaient bonnes, dis-lui que je ne les veux pas academi-
quement correctes, dis-lui que je veux dire que si on photographiait un homme
qui beche, il ne bicherait certainement pas. Dis-lui que je trouve les figures de
Michel-Ange admirables, quoique les jambes soienr decidement trop longues,
les hanches et les cuisses trop larges ... les vrais peintres . . . ne peignent pas

54 ART AND REPRESENTATION

does not see in his sitter at all. And all this is done systema-
tically and skilfully, so as to produce something that the
patron will think ‘like’ the original. People and things look
different to us according to the emotion we feel in lboking
at them. A wild animal of which we are afraid looks larger
than it would if we were not afraid of it; its teeth and claws
are especially magnified. A mountain on which we imagine
ourselves climbing looks exaggeratedly steep and rugged.
A person of whom we stand in awe seems to have large and
piercing eyes. Photographs or literally accurate drawings
of these things will be emotionally unlike them; and a tactful
painter will put in the appropriate exaggerations and so
produce an emotionally correct likeness; correct, that is, for
the particular audience he has in mind.

Representation in art is thus not the same thing as
naturalism. Naturalism is not even identical with literal
representation as such, but only with the literal representa-
tion of that common-sense world of things as they appear to
a normal and healthy eye which we call nature. Breughel’s
pictures of animal-demons, Strindberg’s Spook Sonata , Poe’s
thrillers, Beardsley’s fantastic drawings, surrealist paintings,
are strictly and literally representational ; but the world they
represent is not the common-sense world, it is the world of
delirium, an abnormal or even insane world permanently
inhabited, no doubt, only by the insane, but visited on occa-
sion by all of us.

Roughly speaking, we may distinguish three degrees of
representation. First, a naive or almost non-selective repre-
sentation, which attempts (or seems to attempt) the im-
possible task of complete literalness. We find examples in
palaeolithic animal-painting or Egyptian portrait-sculpture;
though it is well to remember that these things are a great
deal more sophisticated than we are apt to suppose. Secondly,
it is found that the same emotional effect can be produced,
perhaps even more successfully, by bold selection of im-

les choses telles qu’elles sont, . . . mais comma eux . . . les sentent.’ Lettres,
ed. Philippart (1937), p. 128.

ART AND REPRESENTATION 55

portant or characteristic features and suppression of all else.
What is meant by calling these features important or charac-
teristic is simply that they are found capable by themselves
of evoking the emotional response. For example: suppose
an artist wanted to reproduce the emotional effect of a ritual
dance in which the dancers trace a pattern on the ground.
The modern traveller would photograph the dancers as they
stand at a given moment. A conventional modern artist,
with a mind debauched by naturalism, would draw them in
the same kind of way. This would be a silly thing to do,
because the emotional effect of the dance depends not on any
instantaneous posture but on the traced pattern. The
sensible thing would be to leave out the dancers altogether,
and draw the pattern by itself.

This is certainly the explanation of much ‘primitive’ art
which at first sight appears altogether non-representative:
spirals, mazes, plaits and so forth. I think that, for example,
it may possibly be the explanation of the strange curvilinear
designs which are so characteristic of pre-Christian Celtic
art in the La Tene period. These patterns produce a powerful
and very peculiar emotional effect, which I can best describe
as a mixture of voluptuousness and terror. This effect is
certainly not accidental. The Celtic artists knew what they
were doing; and I imagine that they produced this emotional
reaction for religious or magical reasons. I conjecture that
the state of mind may originally have been evoked by the
dance-patterns of their religious ceremonies, and that the
patterns we possess may be representations of these.

An artifact representing its original in this second degree
is sometimes, by psycho-analysts and others, called a
‘symbol’ of the original. The word is a misleading one. It
suggests a difference in kind between a symbol and a copy
or transcript, whereas the difference between the two things
is one of degree; and it suggests that the choice of a symbol
is effected by some kind of agreement or compact in which
certain persons agree to use the thing so called for certain
purposes ; for that is what the word ‘symbol’ means. Nothing

S 6 ART AND REPRESENTATION

of that sort takes place here. What does take place is a
selective literal representation, empirically found to be an
effective means of emotional representation.

People sometimes talk as if ‘selection’ were an essential
part of every artist’s work. This is a mistake. In art proper
there is no such thing; the artist draws what he sees, expresses
what he feels, makes a clean breast of his experience, con-
cealing nothing and altering nothing. What these people
are discussing, when they talk aboyt selection, is not the
theory of art proper but the theory of representative art of
the second degree, which they mistake for art proper.

The third degree abandons literal representation alto-
gether; but the work is still representative, because it aims,
this time with a single eye, at emotional representation.
Thus music, in order to be representative, need not copy
the noises made by bleating sheep, an express locomotive at
speed, or a rattle in the throat of a dying man. The pianoforte
accompaniment of Brahms’s song Feldeinsamkeit does not
make noises in the least degree resembling those heard by a
man lying in deep grass on a summer’s day and watching the
clouds drift across the sky; but it does make noises which
evoke a feeling remarkably like that which a man feels on
such an occasion. The erotic music of a modern dance-band
may or may not consist of noises like those made by persons
in a state of sexual excitement, but it does most powerfully
evoke feelings like those proper to such a state. If any
reader is offended at my suggesting an identity in principle
between Brahms and jazz, I am sorry the suggestion offends
him, but I make it deliberately.

IV

ART AS MAGIC

§ x . What magic is not: (i) -pseudo-science

Representation, we have seen, is always means to an end.
The end is the re-evocation of certain emotions. According
as these are evoked for.their practical value or for their own
sake, it is called magic or amusement.

My use of the term ‘magic’ in this connexion is certain to
cause difficulty; but I cannot avoid it, for reasons which I
hope will become clear. I must therefore see to it that the
difficulty does not amount to misunderstanding, at any rate
in the case of readers who wish to understand.

The word ‘magic’ as a rule carries no definite significance
at all. It is used to denote certain practices current in
‘savage’ societies, and recognizable here and there in the
less ‘civilized’ and less ‘educated’ strata of our own society,
but it is used without any definite conception of what it
connotes; and therefore, if some one asserts that, for example,
the ceremonies of our own church are magical, neither he
nor any one else can say what the assertion means, except
that it is evidently intended to be abusive; it cannot be
described as true or false. What I am here trying to do is
to rescue the word ‘magic’ from this condition in which it is
a meaningless term of abuse, and use it as a term with a
definite meaning.

Its degradation into a term of abuse was the work of a
school of anthropologists whose prestige has been deservedly
great. Two generations ago, anthropologists set them-
selves the task of scientifically studying the civilizations
different from our own which had been lumped together
under the unintelligently depreciatory (or, at times, unin-
telligently laudatory) name of savage. Prominent among the
customs of these civilizations they found practices of the kind
which by common consent were called magical. As scientific

S 8 ART AS MAGIC

students, it was their business to discover the motive of

these practices. What, they asked themselves, is magic for?

The direction in which they looked for an answer to this
question was determined by the prevailing influence of a
positivistic philosophy which ignored man’s emotional nature
and reduced everything in human experience to terms of
intellect, and further ignored every kind of intellectual
activity except those which, according to the same philo-
sophy, went to the making of natwal science. This pre-
judice led them to compare the magical practices of the
‘savage’ (civilized men, they rashly assumed, had none,
except for certain anomalous things which these anthropo-
logists called survivals) with the practices of civilized man
when he uses his scientific knowledge in order to control
nature. The magician and the scientist, they concluded,
belong to the same genus. Each is a person who attempts
to control nature by the practical application of scientific
knowledge. The difference is that the scientist actually
possesses scientific knowledge, and consequently his attempts
to control nature are successful : the magician possesses none,
and therefore his attempts fail. For example, irrigating
crops really makes them grow; but the savage, not knowing
this, dances at them in the false belief that his example will
encourage in the crops a spirit of emulation, and induce
them to grow as high as he jumps. Thus, they concluded,
magic is at bottom simply a special kind of error: it is errone-
ous natural science. And magical practices are pseudo-
scientific practices based on this error. 1 /

This theory of magic as pseudo-science is an extraordinarily
confused piece of thinking. It would not be worth our while
here to disentangle with anything like completeness the
tissue of blunders and prejudices on which it rests; I shall
content myself with two criticisms.

/ 1 This theory was propounded by Sir Edward Tylor in 1871 ( Primitive
I Culture , ch. iv). The fact that it is still taught in our own time by Sir James
'‘Frazer {The Golden Bough, passim.) has been a disaster to contemporary
Anthropology and all the studies connected with it.

1

ART AS MAGIC 59

1. It was excusable in Locke to classify savages with
idiots as a kind of persons incapable of logical thinking, for
Locke and his contemporaries knew practically nothing
about them. But it was very far from excusable in nineteenth-
century anthropologists, who knew that the peoples they
called savage, even apart from the intellectual power ex-
hibited by their habit of devising extremely complex
political, legal, and linguistic systems, understood enough of
the connexions between causes and effects in nature to
perform delicate operations in metallurgy, agriculture, stock-
breeding, and so forth. A man who can grasp the relation
of causes and effects sufficiently to make a hoe out of
crude iron ore is not the scientific imbecile that Tylor’s
theory, and the grotesque elaborations it has received at
the hands of French psychologists, would lead us to believe.

2. Even if he were, the theory does not fit the facts it was
devised to explain. Here is one of them. A ‘savage’, in order
to prevent his nail-clippings from falling into the hands of an
enemy, destroys them with meticulous care. When the
anthropologist asks him why, he explains that his purpose is
to prevent the enemy from using them as a magical weapon
against himself; for if they were maliciously destroyed with
the proper ceremonies, the destruction would spread to the
body from which they had been cut. The anthropologist,
anxious to see why his informant entertains a belief so
obviously groundless (for a simple experiment, he is con-
vinced, would have shown its falsity), thinks out a hypothesis
to explain it; and the hypothesis at which he arrives is that the
‘savage’ believes in a ‘sympathetic’ connexion between the nail-
clippings and the body from which they have been severed,
such that their destruction automatically injures that body.

This second belief is equally groundless, and therefore
itself stands in need of explanation. The English anthropo-
logists, good honest me% did not observe this; but their
more logical French colleagues did, and proceeded to
elaborate an entire theory of ‘primitive mentality’, showing
that the ‘savage’ has a quite peculiar type of mind, not at all

6o ART AS MAGIC

like ours; it does not argue logically like a Frenchman’s, it
does not acquire knowledge through experience like an
Englishman’s, it thinks (if you can call it thinking) by the
methodical development of what, from our point of view,
is a kind of lunacy.

This extraordinary fabric of theory, whose influence on
anthropological science has been hardly more malign than its
influence on the practical relations between Europeans and
the peoples whom they please to call savage, is based on a
simple blunder. The fact which it would serve to explain if
it were true is not the observed fact. The observed fact is
that the ‘savage’ destroys his own nail-clippings. The theory
is that he believes in a ‘mystical’ connexion (to use the
French adjective) between these nail-clippings and his own
body, such that their destruction is injurious to himself.
But, if he believed this, he would regard his own destruction
of his nail-clippings as suicide. He does not so regard it ; there-
fore he does not believe in the alleged ‘mystical’ connexion,
and the grounds on which he has been credited with a
‘primitive mentality’ disappear.

Simple though it is, the blunder is not innocent. It masks
a half-conscious conspiracy to bring into ridicule and con-
tempt civilizations different from our own ; and, in particular,
civilizations in which magic is openly recognized. Anthropo-
logists would of course indignantly deny this; but under
cross-examination their denials would break down. The fact
from which we started was that a ‘savage’ destroys his nail-
clippings to prevent an enemy from destroying them with
certain magical ceremonies. The anthropologist next says
to himself: ‘My informant tells me he is afraid of some one’s
doing two things simultaneously: destroying these nail-
clippings, and performing certain ceremonies. Now, he
must know as well as I do that the ceremonies are mere
hocus-pocus. There is nothing to be afraid of there. Con-
sequently he must be afraid of the destruction of the nail-
clippings.’ Some such work as this must have been going
on in the anthropologist’s mind; for if it had not, he would

ART AS MAGIC 61

not have based his theory on a pseudo-fact (fear of the
destruction of nail-clippings as such) instead of basing it
on the genuine fact which he had correctly observed (fear
of that, destruction when, and only when, accompanied by
magical ceremonies). The motive power behind this sub-
stitution is the anthropologist’s conviction that the ceremonies
which would accompany the destruction of the nail-clippings
are ‘mere hocus-pocus’ and could not possibly hurt any one.
But these ceremonies are the one and only magical part of
the whole business. The alleged theory of magic has been
constructed by manipulating the facts so that all magical
elements are left out of them. In other words, the theory is
a thinly disguised refusal to study magic at all.

Anthropologists of the present day have very little use for
the Tylor-Frazer theory, or for Levy-Bruhl’s psychological
embroidery of it. They are far more intimately acquainted
with the facts of ‘savage’ life than the men who invented and
elaborated that theory; far more intimately, indeed, than the
best-informed of the field-workers on whom these theorists
depended for their data. In consequence they know too
much about magical practices to believe that they can be
explained on positivistic principles as symptoms of disorder
in the machine of inductive thinking. But this movement
of expert opinion away from the Tylor-Frazer theory has
been almost 1 silent; and one result of it has been, strangely,
to confirm that theory in the mind of the general public.
For the increasing vigour of recent anthropological work
has created a demand outside expert circles for anthro-
pological literature; and this has been satisfied by finding
in The Golden Bough an inexhaustible scrap-heap of good
reading. The public, mistaking it for a monument of massive
thought, is beginning to adopt the pseudo-science theory
of magic, just when anthropologists are beginning to
forget it.

1 Not altogether. Cf. e.g. Malinowski’s Durham lectures (1936) on The Foun-
dations of Faith and Morals, p. 5: ‘The conception, for instance, of primitive
magic as a “false scientific technique” does not do justice to its cultural value.*

4430 F

62

ART AS MAGIC

§ 2 . What Magic is not: (ii) Neurosis

Not so much an alternative to the Tylor-Frazer theory of
magic, but rather a specialized development of it, has been
put forward by Freud, in the third chapter of Totem and
Taboo (Eng. tr. by Brill, 1919). Levy-Bruhl had already
tackled the problem of explaining why the ‘savage’s’ mind
should work in so extraordinary a way, and from our point
of view so irrational a way, as is implied by the Tylor-Frazer
theory. He explained it by saying that savages have a
peculiar kind of mind which does work that way ( La
Mentalite primitive, ed. 1, 1913; this original edition bore
the title Les Fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures).
The argument of this book is a very curious piece of
‘metaphysics’ in the Comtian sense : that is, the attempt to
explain facts by inventing occult entities. The nature of a
person’s ‘mentality’ is in itself completely unknowable: it is
only knowable in its manifestations, the ways in which he
thinks and acts. It is no use, therefore, trying to explain his
thinking and acting in an odd way by the hypothesis that he
has an odd kind of ‘mentality’ ; for this hypothesis is unveri-
fiable. Ldvy-Bruhl has in fact given us a perfect up-to-date
example of the method by which, according to Moli&re,
medical students in seventeenth-century Montpellier were
taught to reason.

[Candidate] Mihi domandatur a docto doctore
Causam et rationem quare
Opium facit dormire.

A quoi respondeo:

Quia est in eo
Vertus dormitiva,

Cuius est natura
Sensus assoupire.

[Chorus of examiners] Bene bene bene bene respondere.

Dignus dignus est entrare
In nostro docto corpSre.

Freud, on the contrary, is nothing if not scientific. He
realizes that the scientist’s business is to connect facts not

ART AS MAGIC 63

with occult entities, but with other facts. Asking himself
the same question as L£vy-Bruhl, ‘Why should savages think
in so odd a way ?’, he answers it by bringing the supposed
facts of magic into relation with those of compulsion-
neurosis as studied by himself in his own patients. A child,
he points out, satisfies its wishes by means of sensory halluci-
nations ; that is, it creates satisfying sensations by the centri-
fugal excitement of its sensory organs. The savage does
something not identical with this, but similar to it. He
satisfies his wishes by performing an act representing the
state of things for which he wishes; in other words, by
creating motor hallucinations (op. cit., p. 140). To illustrate,
Freud quotes a patient of his own, a compulsion-neurotic,
who believed that if he thought of a man, the man was
thereby transported to the place; if he cursed a man, the
man died; and so on. This, he observes, amounts to believing
in the omnipotence of one’s thought: to believing that what-
ever one thinks takes place simply because one thinks it.
This curious psychological condition, Freud suggests, is the
condition which underlies magical practices.

This will not do at all. It might serve to explain magic if
magic were something totally different from what it is; but
it has no bearing on the actual facts. For magic consists
essentially in a system of practices, a technique. No magician
believes that he can get what he wants by merely wanting it,
or that things come about because he thinks of them as
happening. On the contrary: it is because he knows that
there is no immediate connexion of this kind between wish
and fulfilment (and is therefore unlike Freud’s patient pre-
cisely in the point wherein Freud compares them) that he
invents or adopts this technique as a middle term to connect
the two things.

Later, Freud seems to be dimly aware of this, and to
realize that a theory of magic which leaves out all reference
to magical practices is not very satisfactory. So he brings
them in by saying that compulsion-neurotics, because they
are alarmed by their own omnipotence, protect themselves

64 ART AS MAGIC

against it by devising formulae and rituals whose function
is to prevent their thoughts and wishes from coming true
(p. I46). These, he says, are the ‘counterpart’ of the magi-
cian’s ritual actions. But the two cases no more resemble
one another than a lightning-conductor resembles a dynamo.
The compulsion-neurotic, being rather cracked, thinks that
his wishes immediately fulfil themselves. Having method in
his madness, he proceeds to invent means of breaking this
immediate connexion, and earthing tl*e power of his thought
harmlessly. The ‘savage’, being a sensible man, knows that
wishes do not immediately fulfil themselves. He therefore
invents means by which to fulfil them.

The problem for any theory of magic is: What kind of
wishes must these be, for actions of the kind we call magical
to serve as means towards their fulfilment? Freud has not
even touched that problem. He has simply burked it by
failing to keep his mind on the peculiarities actually to be
found in magical activity, and by instituting a comparison
between the psychology of magic and the wholly different
psychology of compulsion-ritual. The question which arises
(I shall not pursue it here) is : What force is at work in the
scientific consciousness of modern Europeans which makes it
so hard for them to think straight about magic ? Why should
hard-headed Englishmen and Scotsmen like Tylor and
Frazer, when they come to tackle it, blind themselves to the
very facts they are trying to explain ? Why should an acute
and philosophical Frenchman like Ldvy-Bruhl, when he starts
theorizing about it, talk like one of Moli&re's prize idiots?
Why should Freud, the greatest psychologist of our age,
react to it by losing all his power of distinguishing one kind
of psychological function from its opposite? Are we so
civilized that savagery is too remote from us to be com-
prehensible ? Or are we so terrified of magic that we simply
dare not think straight about it ?

The second alternative is at least a possibility. 'And I
mention it because it is a possibility against which we must
be on our guard. If we, as ‘civilized’ people, are really

ART AS MAGIC 65

terrified of magic, this terror will be a thing we shall not
care to avow. It will show itself partly (this is the only part
that immediately concerns myself and the reader) in the
shape of a very strong disinclination to think about the sub-
ject in a cool and logical manner. It will therefore put every
possible obstacle in the way of our accepting a true theory
of magic, if one is offered us. With this warning, I will try
to state such a theory.

§ 3. What Magic Is

The only profitable way of theorizing about magic is to
approach it from the side of art. The similarities between
magic and applied science, on which the Tylor— Frazer
theory rests, are very slight, and the dissimilarities are great.
The magician as such is not a scientist; and if we admit this,
and call him a bad scientist, we are merely finding a term of
abuse for the characteristics that differentiate him from a
scientist, without troubling to analyse those characteristics.
The similarities between magic and neurosis, on which the
Freudian theory rests, are just as strong or as weak as one
pleases; for neurosis is a negative term, covering many
different kinds of departure from our rough-and-ready
standard of mental health; and there is no reason why one
item in the list of qualifications demanded by a standard of
mental health should not be a disbelief in magic. But the
similarities between magic and art are both strong and
intimate. Magical practices invariably contain, not as peri-
pheral elements but as central elements, artistic activities
like dances, songs, drawing, or modelling. Moreover, these
elements have a function which in two ways resembles the
function of amusement, (i) They are means to a precon-
ceived end, and are therefore not art proper but craft,
(ii) This end is the arousing of emotion.

(i) That magic is essentially means to a preconceived end is,
I think, obvious ; and equally obvious that what is thus used as
means is always something artistic, or rather (since, being used
as means to an end, it cannot be art proper) quasi-artistic.

66 ART AS MAGIC

(ii) That the end of magic is always and solely the
arousing of certain emotions is less obvious; but every one
will admit that this is at least sometimes and partially its end.
The use of the bull-roarer in Australian initiation-ceremonies
is intended, partly at least, to arouse certain emotions in the
candidates for initiation and certain others in uninitiated
persons who may happen to overhear it. A tribe which
dances a war-dance before going to fight its neighbours is
working up its warlike emotions. The warriors are dancing
themselves into a conviction of their own invincibility. The
various and complicated magic which surrounds and accom-
panies the agriculture of a peasant society expresses that
society’s emotions towards its flocks and herds, its crops,
and the instruments of its labour; or rather, evokes in its
members at each critical point in the calendar that emotion,
from among all these, which is appropriate to the corre-
sponding phase of its annual work.

But although magic arouses emotion, it does this in quite
another way than amusement. Emotions aroused by magical
acts are not discharged by those acts. It is important for
the practical life of the people concerned that this should
not happen; and magical practices are magical precisely
because they have been so designed that it shall not happen.
The contrary is what happens : these emotions are focused
and crystallized, consolidated into effective agents in practical
life. The process is the exact opposite of a catharsis. There,
the emotion is discharged so that it shall not interfere with
practical life; here it is canalized and directed upon practical
life.

I am suggesting that these emotional effects, partly on
the performers themselves, partly on others favourably or
unfavourably affected by the performance, are the only
effects which magic can produce, and the only ones which,
when intelligently performed, it is meant to produce. The
primary function of all magical acts, I am suggesting, is to
generate in the agent or agents certain emotions that are
considered necessary or useful for the work of living; their

ART AS MAGIC 67

secondary function is to generate in others, friends or
enemies of the agent, emotions useful or detrimental to the
lives of these others.

To any one with sufficient psychological knowledge to
understand the effect which our emotions have on the
success or failure of our enterprises, and in the production
or cure of diseases, it will be clear that this theory of magic
amply accounts for its ordinary everyday employment in
connexion with the ordinary everyday activities of the people
who believe in it. Such a person thinks, for example, that
a war undertaken without the proper dances would end in
defeat; or that if he took his axe to the forest without doing
the proper magic first, he would not succeed in cutting down
a tree. But this belief does not imply that the enemy is
defeated or the tree felled by the power of the magic as
distinct from the labour of the ‘savage’. It means that, in
warfare or woodcraft, nothing can be done without morale;
and the function of magic is to develop and conserve morale;
or to damage it. For example, if an enemy spied upon our
war-dance and saw how magnificently we did it, might he
not slink away and beg his friends to submit without a
battle ? Where the purpose of magic is to screw our courage
up to the point of attacking, not a rock or a tree, but a human
enemy, the enemy’s will to encounter us may be fatally
weakened by the magic alone. How far this negative
emotional effect might produce diseases of various kinds or
even death is a question about which no student of medical
psychology will wish to dogmatize.

One step beyond this type of case brings us to cases in
which ‘savages’ believe, or seem to believe, that magic can
do things which we ‘civilized’ men believe to be impossible,
like making rain or stopping earthquakes. I am quite pre-
pared to think that they do entertain such beliefs; savages
are no more exempt from human folly than civilized men, and
are no doubt equally liable to the error of thinking that they,
or the persons they regard as their superiors, can do what in
fact cannot be done. But this error is not the essence of magic ;

68 ART AS MAGIC

it is a perversion of magic. And we should be careful how we
attribute it to the people we call savages, who will one day
rise up and testify against us. A peasant whose crops fail be-
cause he has mismanaged them through idleness generally
blames the weather. If magical practices cured his idleness,
there would be nothing to blame the weather for. It is a
serious question whether the real function of rain-making
magic, so called, may not be to cheer up the cultivator and
induce him to work harder, rain ox no rain. Similarly,
magic which is described as intended to stop earthquakes
or floods or the like should be carefully examined in order
to decide whether its true purpose is to avert these natural
calamities, or to produce in men an emotional state of
willingness to bear them with fortitude and hope. If the
second answer proves right, these things too fall into line
with the theory of magic I am here maintaining; if the first,
they will have to be called not magic but perversions of
magic.

If we ask how magic produces these emotional effects, the
answer is easy. It is done by representation. A situation is
created (the warriors brandish their spears, the peasant gets
out his plough, and so forth, when no battle is being fought
and no seed is being sown) representing the practical situa-
tion upon which emotion is to be directed. It is essential
to the magical efficacy of the act that the agent shall be
conscious of this relation, and shall recognize what he is
doing as a war-dance, a plough-ritual, or the like. This is
why, on first approaching the ritual, he must have it ex-
plained to him, either by word of mouth (which may take
the form of initiatory instruction, or of an explanatory speech
or song forming part of the ritual itself) or by such close
mimicry that mistake is impossible.

Magic is a representation where the emotion evoked is an
emotion valued on account of its function in practical life,
evoked in order that it may discharge that function, and
fed by the generative or focusing magical activity into the
practical life that needs it. Magical activity is a kind of

ART AS MAGIC 69

dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the
emotional current that drives it. Hence magic is a necessity
for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in
every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own
thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mis-
taken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing
for lack of interest in its own maintenance.

^4. Magical Art

A magical art is an art which is representative and there-
fore evocative of emotion, and evokes of set purpose some
emotions rather than others in order to discharge them into
the affairs of practical life. Such an art may be good or bad
when judged by aesthetic standards, but that kind of good-
ness or badness has little, if any, connexion with its efficacy
in its own proper work. The brilliant naturalism of the
admittedly magical palaeolithic animal paintings cannot be
explained by their magical function. Any kind of scrawl or
smudge would have served the purpose, if the neophyte on
approaching it had been solemnly told that it ‘was’ a bison.
When magical art reaches a high aesthetic level, this is
because the society to which it belongs (not the artists alone,
but artists and audience alike) demands of it an aesthetic
excellence quite other than the very modest degree of
competence which would enable it to fulfil its magical
function. Such an art has a double motive. It remains at a
high level only so long as the two motives are felt as absolutely
coincident. As soon as a sculptor thinks to himself ‘surely
it is a waste of labour to finish this portrait with such care,
when it is going to be shut up in a tomb as soon as it leaves
my hand’, the two motives have come apart in his mind.
He has conceived the idea that something short of his best
work, in the aesthetic sense of that phrase, would satisfy the
needs of magic; and decadence at once begins. Indeed, it
has begun already; for ideas of that kind only come up into
consciousness long after they have begun to influence
conduct.

7 o ART AS MAGIC

The change of spirit which divides Renaissance and
modern art from that of the Middle Ages consists in the
fact that medieval art was frankly and definitely magical,
while Renaissance and modern art was not. I say ‘was’ not,
because the climax of this non-magical or anti-magical
period in the history of art was reached in the late nineteenth
century, and the tide is now visibly turning. But there were
always eddies in the tide-stream. There were cross-currents
even in the nineties, when English literary circles were domi-
nated by a school of so-called aesthetes professing the doctrine
that art must not subserve any utilitarian end but must be
practised for its own sake alone. This cry of art for art’s sake
was in some ways ambiguous; it did not, for example,
distinguish art proper from amusement, and the art which
its partisans admired and practised was in fact a shameless
amusement art, amusing a select and self-appointed clique;
but in one way it was perfectly definite: it ruled out magical
art altogether. Into the perfumed and stuffy atmosphere
of this china-shop burst Rudyard Kipling, young, nervous,
short-sighted, and all on fire with the notion of using his
very able pen to evoke and canalize the emotions which in
his Indian life he had found to be associated with the govern-
ing of the British Empire. The aesthetes were horrified, not
because they disapproved of imperialism, but because they
disapproved of magical art; Kipling had blundered right up
against their most cherished taboo. What was worse, he
made a huge success of it. Thousands of people who knew
those emotions as the steam in the engine of their daily work
took him to their hearts. But Kipling was a morbidly sensi-
tive little man, and the rebuff he had met with from the
aesthetes blasted the early summer of his life. Henceforth he
was torn between two ideals, and could pursue neither with
undivided allegiance.

To-day the boot is on the other leg. It is Kipling, and
not Wilde, whose principles are in favour. Most of our
leading young writers have reverted to magical art; and this
reversion is by far the most conspicuous fact in English art

ART AS MAGIC 7 r

to-day. To the aesthetician it is unimportant that this new
magical literature is the propaganda no longer of imperialism
but of communism. It is unimportant to him (though very
important to the politician) that, of the two warring creeds
which are dividing the inheritance of nineteenth-century
liberalism, communism appears to have tongue, eyes, and
fingers, and fascism only teeth and claws. What is important
to the aesthetician is the re-emergence of a very old kind of
aesthetic consciousness: one which reverses the painfully
taught lesson of nineteenth-century criticism, and instead of
saying ‘never mind about the subject; the subject is only a
corpus vile on which the artist has exercised his powers, and
what concerns you is the artist’s powers and the way in
which he has here displayed them’, says ‘the artist’s powers
can be displayed only when he uses them upon a subject
that is worthy of them’. This new aesthetic consciousness
involves a two-eyed stance. It regards the subject as an
integral element in the work of art; it holds that, in order to
appreciate any given work of art, one must be interested in its
subject for its own sake, as well as in the artist’s handling of it.

To the aesthetician trained in a nineteenth-century school,
these are words of horror. To take them seriously would
mean looking forward to an age of artistic decadence and
barbarism: an age when the infinitely difficult quest of
artistic perfection will be shelved in favour of an easy pro-
paganda; when artists will be judged not on their artistic
merits but on their conformity with the political and moral
and economic dogmas accepted by the society to which they
belong; when the hard- won freedom of modern art will be
thrown away, and obscurantism will reign supreme.

I will not pursue this question further. In another place
we shall have to consider it seriously. For the present, we
will simply register the facts that a recrudescence of magical
art is going on before our eyes, and that aesthetic theorists
and critics are in two minds how to take it.

I spoke of a recrudescence. But it appears as a recrudes-
cence only if we take a very snobbish or high-brow view of

72 ART AS MAGIC

' what constitutes art. The self-elected circle of artists and
litterateurs have no monopoly of artistic production. Out-
side that circle we have had two vigorous streams at least
of artistic tradition since the Renaissance; and in each case
the magical quality of the art is unmistakable.

First, there is the native art of the poor: in particular, that
rustic or peasant art which goes by the patronizing name of
folk-art. This folk-art, consisting of songs and dances and
stories and dramas which in this country (with its tradition
of a patronizing contempt for the poor) were allowed to perish
almost completely 1 before ‘educated’ persons had become
aware of their existence, was largely magical in its origin
and motive. It was the magical art of an agricultural people.

Secondly, there are the traditional low-brow arts of the
upper classes. Of these (since their nature is very often
misunderstood) it will be necessary to speak in greater
detail. I refer to such things as the prose of the pulpit, the
verse of hymns, the instrumental music of the military band
and the dance band, the decoration of drawing-rooms, and
so forth. I can see the high-brow reader pulling a face and
hear him cry ‘This, God help us, is not art at all’. I know;
but it is magic; and now that the relation between art and
magic is becoming an important problem once more, no
longer to be dismissed with a facile negation, it concerns the
aesthetician to find that magic has been flourishing, unre-
cognized but omnipresent, among the leaders (as they think
themselves) of a society whose claim to enlightenment is
based on its belief that it has given magic up altogether.

The case of religious art eo nomine , with its hymns and
ceremonies and ritual acts, hardly needs analysis. Obviously
its function is to evoke, and constantly re-evoke, certain
emotions whose discharge is to be effected in the activities
of everyday life. In calling it magical I am not denying its
claim to the title religious. Now that we have given up using
the word ‘magic’ as a term of abuse, and have decided what

1 By 1893, 140 ‘fairy tales’ had been collected in England; few others have
been found since. In 1870-90, France and Italy yielded over 1,000 each.

ART AS MAGIC 7.3

it means, no one need fasten it upon things because he dis-
likes them, or hesitate to use it for things which he respects.
Magic and religion are not the same thing, for magic is the
evocation of emotions that are needed for the work of practical
life, and a religion is a creed, or system of beliefs about the
world, which is also a scale of values or system of conduct.
But every religion has its magic, and what is commonly
called ‘practising’ a religion is practising its magic.

Equally obvious, or jhardly less so, is the case of patriotic
art, whether the patriotism be national or civic or attached
to a party or class or any other corporate body: the patriotic
poem, the school song, the portraits of worthies or statues of
statesmen, the war-memorial, the pictures or plays recalling
historic events, military music, and all the innumerable
forms of pageantry, procession, and ceremonial whose pur-
pose is to stimulate loyalty towards country or city or party
or class or family or any other social or political unit. All
these are magical in so far as they are meant to arouse
emotions not discharged there and then, in the experience
that evokes them, but canalized into the activities of every-
day life and modifying those activities in the interest of the
social or political unit concerned.

Another group of examples may be found in the rituals
which we commonly call sport. Fox-hunting and amateur
football are primarily not amusements, practised for the sake
of harmless entertainment; not means of physical training,
intended to develop bodily strength and skill; they are ritual
activities, undertaken as social duties and surrounded by all
the well-known marks and trappings of magic: the ritual
costume, the ritual vocabulary, the ritual instruments, and
above all the sense of electedness, or superiority over the
common herd, which always distinguishes the initiate and the
hierophant. And in saying this I am not saying anything
new. The ordinary man 1 has already reflected sufficiently
on these things to have formed a just appreciation of their

t

1 And the anthropologist is quite familiar with" my point, Cf. A. M.
Hocart, The Progress of Man (1933).

7 4 ART AS MAGIC

purpose. He regards them as methods of what he calls
‘training character’, whose function is to fit their devotees for
the work of living, and in particular for the work of living in
that station to which it has pleased God to call them. These
sports, we are told, inculcate a team-spirit, a sense of fair
play, a habit of riding straight and taking one’s fences like a
man. In other words, they generate certain emotions destined
to be discharged in certain kinds of everyday situations, with-
out which these situations would not be faced in a becoming
manner. They are the magical part of the religion of being
a gentleman. And even their harshest critics do not deny
this. They do not say that these sports are not magical, or
that their magic is not efficacious. What they say is that the
emotions generated by this traditional English upper-class
magic are not the emotions that best equip a man to live
effectively in the world as it exists to-day.

As a last group of examples, we will consider the cere-
monies of social life: such things as weddings, funerals,
dinner-parties, dances; forms of pageantry (and therefore,
potentially at least, forms of art) which decorate in their
fashion the private lives of modern civilized men and women.
All these are in essence magical. They all involve dressing
up, and a dressing-up which is done not for amusement,
and not for the gratification of individual taste, but according
to a prescribed pattern, often very uncomfortable, and always
so designed as to emphasize the solemnity of the occasion.
This is what anthropologists call the ritual dress of the
initiate. They all involve prescribed forms of speech and at
any rate the rudiments of a ritual vocabulary. They all
involve ritual instruments: a ring, a hearse, a peculiar and
complicated outfit of knives and forks and glasses, each with
its prescribed function. Almost always they involve the use
of flowers of prescribed kinds, arranged in a prescribed
manner, offerings to the genius of the ritual. They always
involve a prescribed demeanour, a ritual gaiety or a ritual
gloom.

As for their purpose, each one is consciously and explicitly

ART AS MAGIC 75

aimed at arousing certain emotions which are meant to
fructify in the later business of practical life.

The pageantry of marriage has nothing to do with the
fact, when it is a fact, that the principals are in love with each
other. On that subject it is dumb; and this is why many
persons deeply in love detest it as an insult to their passion,
and undergo it only because they are forced into it by
the opinion of their families. Its purpose is to create an
emotional motive for maintaining a partnership of a certain
kind, not the partnership of lovers but the partnership of
married people, recognized as such by the world, whether
love is present or no.

The funeral is an emotional reorientation of a different
kind. The mourners are not, essentially, making a public
exhibition of their grief; they are publicly laying aside their
old emotional relation to a living person and taking up a new
emotional relation to that same person as dead. The funeral
is their public undertaking that they are going to live in
future without him. How difficult an undertaking to fulfil
completely, which of us knows his own heart well enough to
say?

The ceremonial of a dinner-party is intended to create
or renew a bond, not of understanding or interest or policy,
but simply of emotion, among the diners, and more par-
ticularly between the host and each several guest. It
consolidates and crystallizes a sentiment of friendship, at
best making each feel what a charming person the other is,
and at worst, that he is not such a bad fellow after all. It
would be a poor dinner-party in which these feelings were
not to some extent evoked, and did not to some extent
survive the party itself.

The dance has always been magical; and so it still is
among ourselves. In its modern and ‘civilized’ form it is
essentially a courtship-ritual. Its intention is to arouse in the
young of each sex an interest in some member of the other
sex, to be selected in the ritual act itself from among the
persons qualified by birth and upbringing (that is to say,

7 6 ART AS MAGIC

by proper initiations undergone at the various critical stages
of life) to unite together in matrimony. This interest, so far
from being satisfied and therefore exhausted in the dance
itself, is intended to fructify in a future partnership. At
bottom, as our more outspoken grandmothers quite correctly
put it, a ball is the occasion on which girls find husbands.

True to type, all these magical ceremonies are represen-
tative. They literally, though selectively, represent the
practical activities they are intended to promote. Like the
war-dance and the plough-ritual, they are ‘symbolic’ in
the sense of that word defined under protest at the end of
Chapter III, § 4. Thus, in marriage, the principals join
hands and walk arm-in-arm through the company, to sym-
bolize their partnership in the eyes of the world. At a
funeral, the mourners leave the dead behind them to sym-
bolize their renunciation of the emotional attitude which
they maintained towards him in life. At a dinner party,
host and guest eat the same food to symbolize the sense of
intimacy and friendliness that is to pervade their more
sympathetic future relations. At a dance the embrace of
partners is a symbol for the embrace of love.

Regarded from the strictly aesthetic point of view, all
these rituals are in general as mediocre as an average
Academy portrait, and for the same reason. The artistic
motive is present in them all ; but it is enslaved and denatured
by its subordination to the magical. Hymn-tunes and
patriotic songs do not as a rule inspire respect in a musician.
A ballet-master is not likely to feel much enthusiasm for a
meet of foxhounds or a cricket-match. The stage manage-
ment of a wedding or dinner-party is seldom of high quality;
and a professional dancer would have little praise for what
goes on at a fashionable ball. But this is of a piece with the
strictly magical character of these rituals : or rather, with the
representative character of which their magical character is
one specific form. They are not art proper, any more than
a portrait or a landscape. Like these things, they have a
primary function which is wholly non-aesthetic : the function

ART AS MAGIC 77

of generating specific emotions. Like them, they may in
the hands of a true artist (who is never to be thought of as
separable from a public that demands true art) become art
as well; and if the artistic and magical motives are felt as
one motive, this is bound to happen, as it happened among
the Aurignacian and Magdalenian cave-men, the ancient
Egyptians, the Greeks, and the medieval Europeans. It can
never happen so long as the motives are felt as distinct, as

among ourselves they invariably are.

•

Note on § 2. — The immediate subject of this book brings me into contact
only with Chapter III of Freud’s Totem and Taboo . The reader will perhaps
pardon me if I add that everything I have said about that chapter applies
mutatis mutandis to the rest. The fallacies are inherent in the principle which
actuated Freud in writing the book: the principle of ‘applying the view-points
and results of psycho-analysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology’.
In plainer English, this means explaining the oddities of savage belief and be-
haviour by analogy with oddities observed by psycho-analysts in their patients.
But Wage’ ,here, means only ‘belonging to any civilization markedly different
from that of modern Europe’; and the ‘oddities’ of savage belief and behaviour
are only such points as seem odd to a modern European, i.e. the points in which
that difference consists. So, in still plainer English, Freud’s programme is to
reduce the differences between non-European and European civilizations to
differences between mental disease and mental health. Is it surprising that
‘the savage hits back’ ?

This is not the place to lay bare in detail the quibbles and sophistries by
which Freud persuades himself (and others too, apparently) that his programme
has been carried out. My purpose in this note is to remark that a person who
can attempt to equate the difference between civilizations with the difference
between mental disease and mental health, in other words to reduce the his-
torical problem of the nature of civilization to a medical problem, is a person
whose views on all problems connected with the nature of civilization will be
false in proportion as he sticks honestly to his attempt, and dangerously false in
proportion as his prestige in his own field stands high. Among these problems
is that of the nature of art.

4436

G

y

ART AS AMUSEMENT
§ x . Amusement Art

If an artifact is designed to stimulate a certain emotion, and
if this emotion is intended not for discharge into the occupa-
tions of ordinary life, but for enjoyment as something of value
in itself, the function of the artifact is to amuse or entertain.
Magic is useful, in the sense that the emotions it excites
have a practical function in the affairs of every day; amuse-
ment is not useful but only enjoyable, because there is a
watertight bulkhead between its world and the world of
common affairs. The emotions generated by amusement
run their course within this watertight compartment.

Every emotion, dynamically considered, has two phases
in its existence: charge or excitation, and discharge. The
discharge of an emotion is some act done at the prompting
of that emotion, by doing which we work the emotion off
and relieve ourselves of the tension which, until thus dis-
charged, it imposes upon us. The emotions generated by an
amusement must be discharged, like any others; but they
are discharged within the amusement itself. This is in fact
the peculiarity of amusement. An amusement is a device
for the discharge of emotions in such a way that they shall
not interfere with the concerns of practical life. But since
practical life is only definable as that part of life which is not
amusement, this statement, if meant for a definition, would
be circular. We must therefore say: to establish a distinction
between amusement and practical life 1 is to divide experi-
ence into two parts, so related that the emotions generated
in the one are not allowed to discharge themselves in the
other. In the one, emotions are treated as ends in them-
selves; in the other, as forces whose operation achieves cer-

1 Aestheticians who discuss the relation between two mutually exclusive
things called ‘Art’ and ‘Life’ are really discussing this distinction.

ART AS AMUSEMENT 79

tain ends beyond them. The first part is now called amuse-
ment, the second part practical life.

In order that emotion may be discharged without affecting
practical life, a make-believe situation must be created in
which to discharge it. This situation will of course be one
which ‘represents’ (cf. Chapter III, § 4) the real situation in
which the emotion would discharge itself practically. The
difference between the two, which has been indicated by
calling them respectively real and make-believe, is simply
this : the so-called make-believe situation is one in which it is
understood that the emotion discharged shall be ‘earthed’,
that is, shall not involve the consequences which it would
involve under the conditions of practical life. Thus, if one
man expresses hatred for another by shaking his fist at him,
threatening him, and so forth, he will ordinarily be regarded
as a dangerous character, dangerous in particular to the man
he has threatened, who will therefore take steps of one kind
or another to protect himself : perhaps by appeasing the first,
perhaps by attacking him and overpowering him, perhaps
by obtaining police protection. If it is understood that
nothing of this sort is to be done, that life is to go on exactly
as if nothing had happened, then the situation in which the
anger was expressed is called a make-believe situation.

Situations of this kind resemble those created by magic in
being representative, that is, in evoking emotions like those
evoked by the situations they are said to represent. They
differ in being ‘unreal’ or ‘make-believe’ ; that is, in that the
emotions they evoke are intended to be earthed instead of
overflowing into the situations represented. This element
of make-believe is what is known as (theatrical) ‘illusion’, an
element peculiar to amusement art, and never found either
in magic or in art proper. If in a magical ritual one says of a
painting ‘this is a bison’, or of a wax figure ‘this is my
enemy’, there is no illusion. One knows perfectly well the
difference between the two things. The make-believe of
amusement art differs radically, again, from the so-called
make-believe of childish games, which is not amusement but

80 ART AS AMUSEMENT

a very serious kind of work, which we call make-believe by
way of assimilating it to something that occurs in our adult
experience. Calling it by that misdescriptive name, we
patronizingly license the child to go on with it; so that the
child can work at the really urgent problems of its own life
unhampered by the interference which would certainly be
forthcoming if adults knew what it was doing.

Comparisons have often been made, sometimes amounting
to identification, between art and play. They have never
thrown much light on the nature of art, because those who
have made them have not troubled to think what they meant
by play. If playing means amusing oneself, as it often does,
there is no important resemblance between play and art
proper; and none between play and representative art in its
magical form; but there is more than a mere resemblance
between play and amusement art. The two things are the
same. If playing means taking part in ritual games, art
proper bears little resemblance to that, and amusement art
even less; but such games, as we have already seen, not only
resemble magic, they are magic. But there is another thing
we call play: that mysterious activity which occupies the
waking and working lives of children. It is not amusement,
though we adults may amuse ourselves by imitating it, and
even on privileged occasions taking part in it. It is not
magic, though in some ways rather like it. Perhaps it is
a good deal like art proper. Giambattista Vico, who knew
a lot both about poetry and about children, said that children
were ‘sublime poets’, and he may have been right. But no
one knows what children are doing when they play; it is
far easier to find out what poets are doing when they write,
difficult though that is; and even if art proper and children’s
play are the same thing, no light is thrown for most of us
on art proper by saying so. 1

1 Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld (Play in Childhood , 1935) has devised a
method for exploring the unknown world of children’s play, and has made
stran|e discoveries about the relation of this play to the child’s health. My
own interpretation of her discoveries may be expressed by saying that they
suggest an identity between ‘play’ in children and art proper. On the

ART AS AMUSEMENT 81

There is a hedonistic theory of art: open, like all forms of
hedonism, to the objection that even if the function of art is
to give ‘delight’ (as many good artists have said), still this
delight is not pleasure in general but pleasure of a particular
kind. When this objection has been met, the theory is a
fair enough account of amusement art. The artist as pur-
veyor of amusement makes it his business to please his
audience by arousing certain emotions in them and providing
them with a make-believe situation in which these emotions
can be harmlessly discharged.

The experience of being amused is sought not for the sake
of anything to which it stands as means, but for its own sake.
Hence, while magic is utilitarian, amusement is not utili-
tarian but hedonistic. The work of art, so called, which
provides the amusement, is, on the contrary, strictly utili-
tarian. Unlike a work of art proper, it has no value in itself;
it is simply means to an end. It is as skilfully constructed as a
work of engineering, as skilfully compounded as a bottle of
medicine, to produce a determinate and preconceived effect,
the evocation of a certain kind of emotion in a certain kind
of audience; and to discharge this emotion within the limits
of a make-believe situation. When the arts are described in
terms implying that they are essentially forms of skill, the
reference, as the terms are ordinarily used nowadays, is
to this utilitarian character of amusement art. When the
spectator’s reception of them is described in psychological
terms as a reaction to stimulus, the reference is the same.
Theoretically, in both cases, the reference might be to
the magical type of representation; but in the modern
world that is generally ignored. For the student of modern
aesthetic, it is a good rule, whenever he hears or reads
statements about art which seem odd or perverse or untrue,
to ask whether their oddity (or apparent oddity) may not
be due to a confusion between art proper and amusement;

relation between art and health of mind (involving health of body so far as
psychological causes may impair or improve bodily health), I shall have
something to say later on (Chapter X, § 7 ; Chapter XII, § 3).

82 ART AS AMUSEMENT

a confusion cither in the mind of their authors, or in his

own.

§ 2. Profit and Delight 1

Magical function and amusement function in a work of
art are of course mutually exclusive, so far as a given emotion
in a given audience at a given moment is concerned. You
cannot arouse in your audience a certain emotion (say,
hatred of the Persians) and arrange at one and the same
moment for its discharge in an amusement form, by raising
a laugh at their expense, and in a practical form, by burning
down their houses. But the emotion aroused by any given
representation is never simple; it is always a more or less
complicated stream or pattern of different emotions; and
it is not necessary that all these should be provided with the
same kind of discharge. In a general way, some are dis-
charged practically, others earthed; the artist, if he knows his
job, arranging which shall be discharged in this way, which
in that. So Horace: omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci\
where the utile is the discharge of an emotion into practice,
the dulce its discharge in the make-believe of amusement.
‘We do not write these novels merely to amuse’, says
Captain Marryat in Midshipman Easy, and goes on to boast
that he has used his novels not unsuccessfully in the past
to advocate reforms in naval administration. Mr. Bernard
Shaw is another devout follower of Horace. There has never
been any damned nonsense about art with him; he has
careered through life most successfully as an entertainer,
careful always to keep a few ball cartridges among his blank,
and send his audience home indignant about the way people
treat their wives, or something like that. But although he
follows the same tradition as Marryat, it is doubtful whether
he could claim an equal record of success as a pamphleteer.
The difference is not so much between one writer and another
as between one age and another. In the hundred years that

1 The ends of all, who for the Scene doe write
Are, or should be, to profit, and delight.

B. Jonson, Epiccene, or the Silent Woman.

ART AS AMUSEMENT 83

have elapsed since Midshipman Easy was published, the
ability of both artists and public to mix a dose of magic with
their amusement has sensibly declined. Mr. Galsworthy
began his career by putting so much utile and so little duke
into his stage-puddings that only very determined stomachs
could digest them at all. So he gave up playing with magic,
and specialized in entertaining a rather grim class of readers
with the doings of the Forsyte family.

People who are not really competent in magic, as the fairy-
tales wisely tell us, should be careful to leave it alone. One
of the typical features of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century literature is the way in which sound knockabout
entertainers like Jerome K. Jerome or successful ginger-beer
merchants like Mr. A. A. Milne suddenly come over all
solemn, pull themselves together, and decide to become
good influences in the lives of their audience. Nothing quite
like it had ever happened before. It is a curious and un-
pleasant instance of the decline in taste which the nineteenth
century brought in its train.

In general, the representational artist urgently needs to be
a man of taste, in the sense that he must, on pain of profes-
sional disaster, know what emotions to excite. Unless he
means to act as a magician, like Timotheus in Dryden’s ode,
and excite passions which those who feel them cannot
discharge in anything short of practical acts, he must choose
passions which, in the case of this particular audience, will
submit to make-believe gratification. There is always a
danger that, when once an emotion has been aroused, it may
break down the watertight bulkhead and overflow into
practical life; but it is the aim of both the amuser and the
amused that this disaster shall not happen, and that by a
loyal co-operation the bulkhead shall remain intact. The
artist must steer a middle course. He must excite emotions
which are closely enough connected with his audience’s
practical life for their excitation to cause lively pleasure;
but not so closely connected that a breach of the bulkhead is
a serious danger. Thus, a play in which a foreign nation is

84 ART AS AMUSEMENT

held up to ridicule will not amuse an audience in whom
there is no sense of hostility towards that nation ; but neither
will it amuse one in whom this hostility has come near to
boiling-point. A smoking-room story which amuses middle-
aged clubmen would not amuse an old man who had
out-grown sexual desire, nor a young man in whom it was
agonizingly strong.

§ 3. Examples of Amusement Art

The emotions which admit of being thus played upon for
purposes of amusement are infinitely various ; we shall take
a few examples only. Sexual desire is highly adaptable to
these purposes ; easily titillated, and easily put off with make-
believe objects. Hence the kind of amusement art which at
its crudest and most brutal is called pornography is very
common and very popular. Not only the representation of
nudity which reappeared in European painting and sculpture
at the Renaissance, when art as magic was replaced by art
as amusement, but the novel, or story based on a sexual
motive, which dates from the same period, is essentially an
appeal to the sexual emotions of the audience, not in order
to stimulate these emotions for actual commerce between
the sexes, but in order to provide them with make-believe
objects and thus divert them from their practical goal in the
interests of amusement. The extent to which this make-
believe sexuality has affected modern life can hardly be
believed until the fact has been tested by appeal to the
circulating libraries, with their flood of love-stories; the
cinema, where it is said to be a principle accepted by almost
every manager that no film can succeed without a love-
interest; and above all the magazine and newspaper, where
cover-designs, news-items, fiction, and advertisement are
steeped in materials of the same kind : erotic stories, pictures
of pretty girls variously dressed and undressed, or (for the
female reader) of attractive young men : pornography
homoeopathically administered in doses too small to shock
the desire for respectability, but quite large enough to

ART AS AMUSEMENT 85

produce the intended effect. Small wonder that Monsieur
Bergson has called ours an ‘aphrodisiac civilization*. But the
epithet is not quite just. It is not that we worship Aphrodite.
If we did, we should fear these make-believes as a too
probable cause of her wrath. An aphrodisiac is taken with
a view to action : photographs of bathing girls are taken as a
substitute for it. The truth may rather be that these things
reveal a society in which sexual passion has so far decayed
as to have become no longer a god, as for the Greeks, or a
devil, as for the early Christians, but a toy: a society where
the instinctive desire to propagate has been weakened by a
sense that life, as we have made it, is not worth living, and
where our deepest wish is to have no posterity.

The case of sexual fantasy is peculiar, because it seems in
this way to have got out of hand, and thus to betray something
amiss with our civilization as a whole. There are plenty of
other cases where this complication is absent. For example,
much pleasure may be derived from the emotion of fear;
and to-day this is provided by a galaxy of talent devoted to
writing stories of terrible adventure. The ‘thriller’, to give
the thing its current name, is not new. We find it on the
Elizabethan stage, in the charnel-house sculpture of seven-
teenth-century tombs (the Last Judgements of medieval art
were aimed not at making flesh creep but at reforming sinful
lives), in the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe and ‘Monk’ Lewis, in
the engravings of Dor6, and, raised to the level of art proper,
in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and
the Finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Among ourselves,
the spread of literacy has begotten upon the old penny
dreadful a monstrous progeny of hair-raising fiction con-
cerned with arch-criminals, gunmen, and sinister foreigners.
Why the ghost story, once so valuable for this purpose, has
lost its efficacy, although heathenish rites, with much explicit
bloodshed and even more hinted obscenity, are still in lively
demand, is a curious problem for the historian of ideas.

The detective story, the most popular form of amusement
offered by the profession of letters to the modern public, is

86 ART AS AMUSEMENT

based partly on appeal to the reader’s fear, but partly on a
rich medley of other emotions. In Poe the element of fear
was exceedingly strong, and either because of his influence,
or because of something ingrained in the civilization of the
United States, the present-day American detective story
shows a stronger inclination towards that type than those of
any other nation. American corpses are the bloodiest and
most horribly mangled; American police the most savage in
their treatment of suspects . 1 Another emotion of great
importance in such stories is the delight in power. In what
may be called the Raffles period, this was gratified by
inviting the reader to identify himself with a gallant and
successful criminal; nowadays the identification is with the
detective. A third is the intellectual excitement of solving
a puzzle; a fourth, the desire for adventure, that is to say,
the desire to take part in events as unlike as possible to the
dreary business of actual everyday life. Members of the
scholastic and clerical professions from time to time express
a belief that young people who read these stories, and see
films resembling them, are thereby incited to a career of
crime. This is bad psychology. There is no evidence that
stories of crime are the favourite reading of habitual criminals.
In point of fact, those who constantly read them are on the
whole thoroughly law-abiding folk; and this is only natural,
for the constant earthing of certain emotions, by arousing
and discharging them in make-believe situations, makes it
less likely that they will discharge themselves in practical life.

No one has yet taken up the detective story and raised it
to the level of genuine art. Miss Sayers, indeed, has given
reasons why this cannot be done. Perhaps one reason is the
mixture of motives which this genre has traditionally accepted
as inevitable. A mixture of motives is, on the whole, favour-
able to good amusement, but it can never produce art proper.

1 Cf. Superintendent Kirk: ‘. . . I couldn’t rightly call them a mellering
influence to a man in my line. I read an American story once, and the way
the police carried on — well, it didn’t seem right to me.’ Dorothy L. Sayers,
Busman's Honeymoon, p. 161.

ART AS AMUSEMENT 87

Malice, the desire that others, especially those better than
ourselves, should suffer, is a perpetual source of pleasure to
man ; but it takes different shapes. In Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, bullying in its most violent form is so
common that we can only suppose the average playgoer to
have conceived it as the salt of life. There are extreme cases
like Titus Andronicus and The Duchess of Malfi, where torture
and insult form the chief subject-matter; cases like Vol-
■pone or The Merchant of Venice , where the same motive is
veiled by a decent pretence that the suffering is deserved;
and cases like The Taming of the Shrew , where it is rationalized
as a necessary step to domestic happiness. The same motive
crops out so repeatedly in passages like the baiting of
Malvolio or the beating of Pistol, passages wholly uncon-
nected with the plot of the play, so far as these plays have
a plot, that it has obviously been dragged in to meet a
constant popular demand. The theme is raised to the level
of art proper here and there in Webster, in a few of Shake-
speare’s tragedies, and above all in Cervantes.

In a society which has lost the habit of overt bullying, the
literature of violence is replaced by the literature of cattish-
ness. Our own circulating libraries are full of what is
grandiloquently called satire on the social life of our time;
books whose popularity rests on the fact that they give the
reader an excuse for ridiculing the folly of youth and the
futility of age, despising the frivolity of the educated and
the grossness of the uneducated, gloating over the unhappiness
of an ill-assorted couple, or triumphing over the. feebleness
of a henpecked merchant prince. To the same class of
pseudo-art (they are certainly not history) belong the
biographies of cattishness, whose aim is to release the reader
from the irksome reverence he has been brought up to feel
for persons who were important in their day.

if the Elizabethan was by temperament a bully, the Vic-
torian was by temperament a snob. Literature dealing with
high life at once excites and in fancy gratifies the social
ambition of readers who feel themselves excluded from it;

88 ART AS AMUSEMENT

and a great part of the Victorian novelist’s work was devoted
to making the middle classes feel as if they were sharing in
the life of the upper. Nowadays, when ‘society’ has lost its
glamour, a similar place is taken by novels and films dealing
with millionaires, criminals, film-stars, and other envied
persons. There is even a literature catering for the snobbery
of culture: books and films about Beethoven, Shelley, or,
combining two forms of snobbery in one, a lady in high
station who wins fame as a painter.

There are cases in which we find, not a mixture of amuse-
ment and magic, but a wavering between the two. A con-
siderable literature exists devoted to sentimental topography:
books about the charm of Sussex, the magic of Oxford,
picturesque Tyrol, or the glamour of old Spain. Are these
intended merely to recall the emotions of returned travellers
and to make others feel as if they had travelled, or are they
meant as an invocation — I had almost said, to call fools into
a circle? Partly the one and partly the other; if the choice
had been decisively made, literature of this kind would be
better than it is. Similar cases are the sentimental literature
of the sea, addressed to landsmen, and of the country,
addressed to town-dwellers ; folk-songs as sung not in pubs
and cottages but in drawing-rooms; pictures of horses and
dogs, deer and pheasants, hung in billiard-rooms partly as
charms to excite the sportsman, partly as substitutes for sport.
There is no reason why works of this kind should not be
raised to the level of art, though cases in which that has
happened are exceedingly rare. If it is to happen, there is
one indispensable condition : the ambiguity of motive must
first be cleared up.

§ 4. Representation and the Critic

The question may here be raised, how the practice of art-
criticism is affected by identifying art with representation
in either of its two forms. The critic’s business, as we have
already seen, is to establish a consistent usage of terms: to
settle the nomenclature of the various things which come

ART AS AMUSEMENT 89

before him competing for a given name, saying, ‘this is art,
that is not art’, and, being an expert in this business, per-
forming it with authority. A person qualified so to perform
it is called a judge ; and judgement means verdict, the authori-
tative announcement that, for example, a man is innocent or
guilty. Now, the business of art-criticism has been going on
ever since at least the seventeenth century; but it has always
been beset with difficulties. The critic knows, and always
has known, that in theory he is concerned with something
objective. In principle* the question whether this piece of
verse is a poem or a sham poem is a question of fact, on which
every one who is properly qualified to judge ought to agree.
But what he finds, and always has found, is that in the first
place the critics as a rule do not agree ; in the second place,
their verdict is as a rule reversed by posterity; and in the
third place it is hardly ever welcomed and accepted as useful
either by the artists or by the general public.

When the disagreements of critics are closely studied, it
becomes evident that there is much more behind them than
mere human liability to form different opinions about the
same thing. The verdict of a jury in court, as judges are
never tired of telling them, is a matter of opinion ; and hence
they sometimes disagree. But if they disagreed in the kind
of way in which art-critics disagree, trial by jury would have
been experimented with only once, if that, before being
abolished for ever. The two kinds of disagreement differ
in that the juror, if the case is being handled by a competent
judge, has only one point at which he can go wrong. He
has to give a verdict, and the judge tells him what the
principles are upon which he must give it. The art-critic
also has to give a verdict; but there is no agreement between
him and his colleagues as to the principles on which it must
be given.

This divergence of principle is not due to unsolved
philosophical problems. It does not arise from divergences
between rival theories of art. It arises at a point in thought
which is prior to the formation of any aesthetic theory what-

go ART AS AMUSEMENT

ever. The critic is working in a world where most people,
when they speak of a good painting or a good piece of writing,
mean simply that it pleases them, and pleases specifically
in the way of amusement. The simpler and more vulgar
make no bones about this; I don’t know what ’s good, they
say, but I know what I like. The more refined and artistic
reject this idea with horror. It makes no difference whether
you like it or not, they retort; the question is whether it is
good. The protest is in principle perfectly right; but in
practice it is humbug. It implies that whereas the so-called
art of the vulgar is not art but only amusement, about which
there is of course no objective goodness or badness but only
the fact that a given thing amuses or does not amuse a given
audience, the art of more refined persons is not amusement
but art proper. This is simply snobbery. There is no
difference in attitude between the people who go to see
Gracie Fields and the people who go to see Ruth Draper
except that, having been differently brought up, they are
amused by different things. The cliques of artists and writers
consist for the most part of a racket selling amusement
to people who at all costs must be prevented from thinking
themselves vulgar, and a conspiracy to call it not amusement
but art.

The people who fancy themselves altogether above the
vulgar level of amusement art, but are actually disporting
themselves in that level and nowhere else, call their own
amusements good art in so far as they find them amusing.
The critic is therefore in a false position. He is committed,
in so far as he himself belongs to these people and shares their
shibboleths, to treating what is in fact a question of their
likes and dislikes, their taste in amusements, as if it were that
totally different thing, a question of merits and demerits in
a given artist’s work. And even that way of putting it makes
his task seem easier than it really is. If these refined persons
formed a perfectly compact psychological mob, what amused
one would amuse all, as the same joke may please all members
of a mess or a common-room. But in so far as their only

ART AS AMUSEMENT 91

bond is the negative one of refinement, which only means
being unlike the people they regard as vulgar, they cannot
as a whole exhibit a compact mob-psychology, and different
fractions will be amused by different things. The critic’s
task is now hopeless, because the reasons why some people
belonging to these circles call a book or a picture good will
be the very same reasons why others, equally entitled to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of amusement, will call it bad. And
even if a certain kind of taste may for a time dominate the
whole, or a large part of it, this is sure to be succeeded by
another, from whose point of view the things that amused
the earlier will be said to ‘date’ ; a very curious word, which
nicely blows the gaff of all this sham criticism; for if it had
been a question of genuine art — ‘voyons, Monsieur, le
temps ne fait rien k 1’affaire’.

The critic is generally despised, but he ought rather to be
pitied. The villains of the piece are the self-styled artists.
They have assured him that they are doing something which
it will be worth his while to study, and have then done some-
thing else, on which no critic would waste an hour’s thought.
If the gigantic ramp by which the trade in genteel amuse-
ments passes itself off as art were once for all exposed, the
critics could either come out frankly as the advertisement
writers which many of them are, or stop bothering about
sham art and concentrate, as some of them already do, on
the real thing.

So long as art is identified with amusement, criticism is
impossible; and the fact of its having been so long and so
valiantly attempted is a remarkable proof of the tenacity
with which the modern European consciousness sticks to its
point that there is such a thing as art, and that some day we
shall learn how to distinguish it from the amusement trade. 1

1 It is hardly necessary to remark that the amusement racket has succeeded
in corrupting quite a number of academic and other theoretical writers who
base their aesthetic, or rather anti-aesthetic, on the identification of art with
that which evokes a certain kind of emotion; with the consequence that
‘beauty’ is ‘subjective’, Man (and what a man !) is the measure of all things,
and the critics, not (presumably) being Men but only heroes who have held

92 ART AS AMUSEMENT

If art is identified with magic, the same conclusion follows;
but this conclusion, in a society where magic is at all vigorous,
may easily be masked by the substitution of a false objec-
tivity for a true objectivity, an empirical generality for a
strict universality. A matter of fact, as that this person did
this act, or that this thing is a poem, is valid for everybody at
every time and place. The ‘goodness’ or ‘beauty’ of a ‘work
of art’, if goodness or beauty means power of exciting certain
emotions in the person using the word, has no such validity;
it exists only in relation to the person in whom these emo-
tions are aroused. It may happen that the same work will
arouse the same emotions in others; but this will happen on a
considerable scale only when the society in which it occurs
thinks it necessary to its welfare.

That phrase is susceptible, we may note in passing, of
two interpretations, (i) On a biological view of society, a
society will consist of animals of a certain kind which through
the action of such causes as heredity all possess a certain
type of psychological organization. Owing to the uniformity
of this organization, a stimulus of a specific kind will produce
in all members of the society a specific type of emotion. The
emotion will be necessary to the welfare of the society,
because it is part and parcel of the psychological organization
whose identity in all members of the society constitutes its
principle of unity; and in so far as its members are conscious
of this principle they will see that this emotional unanimity
is necessary to their corporate existence, as a biological fact
on which that existence depends. (2) On an historical view
of society, a society will consist of persons who through com-
munication by language have worked out a certain way of
living together. So far as each one of them feels his own
interests as bound up with those of the society, everything
which forms part of this common way of living will have to
him an emotional value, the strength of this emotion being the
force that binds the society together. In that case, anything

a key-position of the civilized world for two centuries and a half against
overwhelming odds, find that the pass has been sold behind their backs.

ART AS AMUSEMENT 93

intimately connected with their common way of living will
arouse in all members of the society the same type of
emotional response.

On either view, therefore, wherever there is a society of any
kind, there will be certain established forms of corporate
magic, whereby certain standard stimuli evoke certain stan-
dard emotional responses from all its members. If these
stimuli are called ‘works of art’, they are conceived as possess-
ing a ‘goodness’ or ‘beauty’ which in fact is merely their power
to evoke these responses. In so far as the society is really
a society, the appropriate response is really evoked in all its
members, and if they misuse words in this way, they will
all agree that the ‘work of art’ is ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’. But
this agreement is only an empirical generality, holding good
within the society because the society just consists of those
persons who share it. Enemies without, or even mere
foreigners, and traitors within, will just as necessarily
disagree. So long as magic is taken for art, these agreements
and disagreements will be taken for criticism; and in any
given society it will be thought the mark of a good critic to
insist that the common magic of the society is good art.

Reduced to these terms, criticism becomes nugatory.
In this country and at the present time there is not much
danger of the reduction. There are not many people, or if
there are they are not influential, who think we ought to
support home industries by taking pains to bestow special
admiration on English poetry or English music or English
painting because it is English; or even that a decent patrio-
tism should prevent us from criticizing the words or music
of God Save the King or the annual Academy portraits of the
Royal Family. But mistakes are often made by inverting the
same misconception. As we saw at the end of the preceding
chapter, many things which are or might be called art, even
among ourselves and to-day, are in fact a combination of art
and magic in which the predominant motive is magical.
What is demanded of them is that they should discharge a
magical function, not an artistic one. If a musical critic tells

4436 jj

94 ART AS AMUSEMENT

us that God Save the King is a bad tune, well and good; it is
a matter on which he has a right to speak. Perhaps after
all the Elizabethans were wrong to think John Bull a
competent musician. But if he goes on to tell us that we
ought on that account to replace it with a new national
anthem by a better composer, he is confusing an artistic
question with a magical one. To condemn magic for being
bad art is just as foolish as to praise art for being good magic.
And when we find an artist trying to convince us that our
public statues, for example, are artistically bad and ought on
that account to be demolished, we cannot help wondering
whether he is a fool or a knave : a fool for not knowing these
things to be primarily magic, valuable for their magical
qualities and not at all for their artistic, or a knave for know-
ing this perfectly well, but concealing it in order to use
his own artistic prestige as a stalking-horse behind which he
can make a treacherous attack on the emotions which bind
our society together.

§ 5. Amusement in the Modern World

We have already seen that amusement implies a bifurca-
tion of experience into a ‘real’ part and a ‘make-believe’ part,
and that the make-believe part is called amusement in so
far as the emotions aroused in it are also discharged in it and
are not allowed to overflow into the affairs of ‘real’ life.

This bifurcation is no doubt as ancient as man himself; but
in a healthy society it is so slight as to be negligible. Danger
sets in when by discharging their emotions upon make-
believe situations people come to think of emotion as some-
thing that can be excited and enjoyed for its own sake, without
any necessity to pay for it in practical consequences. Amuse-
ment is not the same thing as enjoyment; it is enjoyment which
is had without paying for it. Or rather, without paying for it
in cash. It is put down in the bill and has to be paid for later
on. For example, I get a certain amount of fun out of writing
this book. But I pay for it as I get it, in wretched drudgery
when the book goes badly, in seeing the long summer days

ART AS AMUSEMENT 95

vanish one by one past my window unused, in knowing that
there will be proofs to correct and index to make, and at the
end black looks from the people whose toes I am treading on.
If I knock off and lie in the garden for a day and read Dorothy
Sayers, I get fun out of that too ; but there is nothing to pay.
There is only a bill run up, which is handed in next day when
I get back to my book with that Monday-morning feeling.
Of course, there may be no Monday-morning feeling: I may
get back to the book feeling fresh and energetic, with my
staleness gone. In that base my day off turned out to be not
amusement but recreation. The difference between them
consists in the debit or credit effect they produce on the
emotional energy available for practical life.

Amusement becomes a danger to practical life when the
debt it imposes on these stores of energy is too great to be
paid off in the ordinary course of living. When this reaches
a point of crisis, practical life, or ‘real’ life, becomes emotion-
ally bankrupt ; a state of things which we describe by speaking
of its intolerable dullness or calling it a drudgery. A moral
disease has set in, whose symptoms are a constant craving
for amusement and an inability to take any interest in the
affairs of ordinary life, the necessary work of livelihood and
social routine. A person in whom the disease has become
chronic is a person with a more or less settled conviction that
amusement is the only thing that makes life worth living.
A society in which the disease is endemic is one in which
most people feel some such conviction most of the time.

A moral (or in modern jargon a psychological) disease
may or may not be fatal to the person suffering from it; he
may be driven to suicide, as the only release from taedium
vitae , or he may try to escape it by going in for crime or
revolution or some other exciting business, or he may take
to drink or drugs, or simply allow himself to be engulfed in
a slough of dullness, a dumbly accepted life in which nothing
interesting ever happens, tolerable only when he does not
think how intolerable it is. But moral diseases have this
peculiarity, that they may be fatal to a society in which they

9 6 ART AS AMUSEMENT

are endemic without being fatal to any of its members. A
society consists in the common way of life which its members
practise; if they become so bored with this way of life that
they begin to practise a different one, the old society is dead
even if no one noticed its death.

This is perhaps not the only disease from which societies
may die, but it is certainly one of them. It is certainly, for
example, the disease from which Greco-Roman society died.
Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec
societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in
the sixteenth century ; and it is sometimes thought by people
who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman
Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian
invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of
disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing
and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not
worth preserving.

The same disease is notoriously endemic among ourselves.
Among its symptoms are the unprecedented growth of the
amusement trade, to meet what has become an insatiable
craving; an almost universal agreement that the kinds of
work on which the existence of a civilization like ours most
obviously depends (notably the work of industrial operatives
and the clerical staff in business of every kind, and even that
of the agricultural labourers and other food-winners who
are the prime agents in the maintenance of every civilization
hitherto existing) is an intolerable drudgery; the discovery
that what makes this intolerable is not the pinch of poverty
or bad housing or disease but the nature of the work itself
in the conditions our civilization has created; the demand
arising out of this discovery, and universally accepted as
reasonable, for an increased provision of leisure, which
means opportunity for amusement, and of amusements to
fill it; the use of alcohol, tobacco, and many other drugs, not
for ritual purposes, but to deaden the nerves and distract the
mind from the tedious and irritating concerns of ordinary
life; the almost universal confession that boredom, or lack of

ART AS AMUSEMENT 97

interest in life, is felt as a constant or constantly recurring
state of mind; the feverish attempts to dispel this boredom
either by more amusement or by dangerous or criminal
occupations; and finally (to cut the catalogue short) the
discovery, familiar mutatis mutandis to every bankrupt in the
last stages of his progress, that customary remedies have lost
their bite and that the dose must be increased.

These symptoms are enough to alarm any one who thinks
about the future of the world in which he is living; enough
to alarm even those whose thought for the future goes no
farther than their own lifetime. They suggest that our
civilization has been caught in a vortex, somehow connected
with its attitude towards amusement, and that some disaster
is impending which, unless we prefer to shut our eyes to it
and perish, if we are to perish, in the dark, it concerns
us to understand.

A history of amusement in Europe would fall into two
chapters. The first, entitled panem et circenses , would deal
with amusement in the decadent world of antiquity, the shows
of the Roman theatre and amphitheatre, taking over their
material from the religious drama and games of the archaic
Greek period; the second, called le monde oil l' on s' amuse,
would describe amusement in the Renaissance and modern
ages, at first aristocratic, furnished by princely artists to
princely patrons, then transformed by degrees through the
democratization of society into the journalism and cinema of
to-day, and always visibly drawing its material from the
religious painting and sculpture and music, architecture and
pageantry and oratory, of the Middle Ages.

The first chapter would begin with Plato. Plato’s ob-
servations about poetry and the other arts are difficult for us
to understand, not, as historians of thought generally assume,
because ‘aesthetic was in its infancy’ and Plato’s thoughts
about it inchoate and confused; still less, as others fancy,
because Plato was a philistine with no interest in art; but
because the issues with which he was dealing were not the
familiar problems of academic art-philosophy which we

9 8 ART AS AMUSEMENT

expect them to be, but issues of a quite different kind, highly
relevant to our own practical situation. Plato lived at a time
when the religious art of the earlier Greeks, such as the
Olympian sculptures and the Aeschylean drama, had de-
cisively given way to the new amusement art of the Hellenistic
age. He saw in this change not only the loss of a great artis-
tic tradition and the coming of an artistic decadence, but also
a danger to civilization as a whole. He grasped the distinction
between magical art and amusement art, and attacked amuse-
ment art with all the power of his logic and eloquence.

Modern readers, prejudiced by the current nineteenth-
century identification of art with amusement, have commonly
misinterpreted Plato’s attack on amusement as an attack on
art, have taken upon themselves to resent it in the name of
sound aesthetic theory, and have praised Aristotle for a juster
appreciation of the value of art. In fact, however, Plato and
Aristotle do not differ so very much in their views on poetry,
except at one point. Plato saw that amusement art arouses
emotions which it does not direct to any outlet in practical
life; and wrongly inferred that its excessive development
would breed a society overcharged with purposeless emotions.
Aristotle saw that this did not follow, because the emotions
generated by amusement art are discharged by the amuse-
ment itself. Plato’s error on this point led him to think that
the evils of a world given over to amusement could be cured
by controlling or abolishing amusements. But when the vor-
tex has once established itself, that cannot be done; cause
and effect are now interlocked in a vicious circle, which
will mend itself wherever you break it; what began as the
cause of the disease is now only a symptom, which it is
useless to treat . 1

The dangers to civilization foreseen by Plato’s prophetic
thought were a long time maturing. Greco-Roman society

1 It should be added that in both Plato and Aristotle, and especially in
Plato, the genuine problems of aesthetic are not wholly absent from the
discussion; they lurk in the background, and from time to time loom up and
overshadow those of amusement art.

ART AS AMUSEMENT 99

was vigorous enough to go on paying the interest on the
accumulating debt out of the energies of its everyday life for
six or seven centuries. But from Plato onwards its life was a
rearguard action against emotional bankruptcy. The critical
moment was reached when Rome created an urban prole-
tariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch
free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class
which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in
society, whether economic or military or administrative or
intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported
and being amused. When that had been done, it was only
a question of time until Plato’s nightmare 1 of a consumer’s
society came true: the drones set up their own king, and the
story of the hive came to an end.

Once a class had been created whose only interest lay in
amusement, it acted as an abscess which by degrees drew
away all emotional energies from the affairs of real life.
Nothing could arrest the spread of amusement; no one,
though many tried, could regenerate it by infusing into it
a new spirit of religious purpose or artistic austerity. The
vortex revolved, through manifestations now wholly for-
gotten except by a few curious scholars, until a new con-
sciousness grew up for which practical life was so interesting
that organized amusement was no longer needed. The
consciousness of the old civilization, now bifurcated down
to its very foundations, fell to pieces before the onslaught
of this new unified consciousness, and theatre and amphi-
theatre were deserted by a world that had become Christian.
The Middle Ages had begun, and a new magi co-religious
art was born : this time, an art serving those emotions
which went to the invigorating and perpetuating of Christian
society.

The second chapter would begin with the fourteenth

1 Republic, 573 a— b. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the
Roman Empire, ch. ix-xi. I have worked out the consequences for one pro-
vince of the Roman Empire in Oxford History of England, i (1937), ch. xii-
xiii; cf. especially p. 207.

100 ART AS AMUSEMENT

century, when merchants and princes began to change the
whole character of artistic work by diverting it from the
Church’s use to their own personal service. It would show
how, from a quite early stage, this new movement provoked
violent hostility, such as that which drove Savonarola to burn
Michelangelo’s picture; and how this hostility was drawn
into the service of the Reformation until it became, unlike the
so-called ‘puritanism’ of Plato, even more bitter against
magical art than against amusement art. It would show how
the tradition of this hostility entered into the main stream
of modern civilization through its inheritance by noncon-
formist bankers and manufacturers, the class which became
dominant in the modern world; and how that event drove
the artistic consciousness of the modern world, at the very
moment when it was liberating itself from the shackles of
amusement, into the position of something outcast and
persecuted.

It would show how the new plutocracy, entrenched in
their hereditary anti-artistic point of view, came with their
new social and political domination to ape the ways of the
gentry they had displaced ; how in the course of this process
they made a truce with the arts on condition that the arts
should accept once more the status of amusements; and how
the new dominant classes persuaded themselves to reconcile
their enjoyment of these amusements with a religious
principle according to which there was no room in life for
anything but work. The effect on both parties was disastrous.
The artists, who had struggled from the seventeenth to the
early nineteenth century to work out a new conception of
art, detaching it from the ideas of amusement and magic
alike, and thus liberating themselves from all service,
whether of church or of patron, stifled these thoughts, spared
themselves the labour of developing their new conception
to the height of its potentialities, and put on again the servant’s
liveries they had thrown aside. But they had changed for the
worse, as always happens when revolted slaves go back to
slavery. Their old masters had been, according to their

ART AS AMUSEMENT iot

lights, liberal and encouraging patrons, anxious for the best
their servants could give them. The new masters wanted
something far short of that. There was to be no danger of a
new Restoration comedy or a Chaucerian or Shakespearian
freedom of speech. Bowdler was king. And so the nine-
teenth century went on its way, with a constant decline in
artistic standards as compared with those of its early years,
until by degrees (since slaves come to learn the desires their
lords disown) respectable people began to think of art as
not only an amusement*but a shady one.

The masters, too, were the worse for it. Conscience
allowed no place in their lives for amusement; and by
accepting the arts as amusements they were touching the
forbidden thing. The gospel of work ceased to hold them.
They got into the habit of deserting their business on making
a fortune, and ‘retiring’ into a state of pseudo-gentility,
distinguished from real gentility not by their pronunciation
or their table-manners, which were no odder than those of
many a squire, but by the fact that they had no duties to the
community, whether military or administrative or magical,
such as occupied the real gentry. They had nothing to do
but amuse themselves, and many of them did so by collecting
pictures and so forth as the eighteenth-century nobility had
set them example. The art-galleries of northern towns are
there in evidence. But the poor, who are always the last
guardians of a tradition, knew that the curse of God rested
on idleness, and spoke of three generations from clogs to
clogs.

That was the first stage in the formation of the vortex.
The second, far graver, was the corruption of the poor
themselves. Until close on the end of the nineteenth century,
the rustic population of England had an art of its own,
rooted in the distant past but still alive with creative vigour :
songs and dances, seasonal feasts and dramas and pageantry,
all of magical significance and all organically connected with
agricultural work. In a single generation this was wiped out
of existence by the operation of two causes : the Education

xos ART AS AMUSEMENT

Act of 1870, which, as imposing on the countryman an
education modelled on town-dwellers’ standards, was one
stage in the slow destruction of English rural life by the
dominant industrial and commercial class; and the ‘agricul-
tural depression’, to give that vague and non-committal name
to the long series of events, partly accidental and partly
deliberate, which between 1870 and 1900 wrecked the
prosperity of the English agricultural population. 1

A similar process was going on among the poor of the
towns. They too had a vital and ‘flourishing folk-art of
the same magical type; they too were deprived of it by the
organized forces of the law acting as the secular arm of the
ruling industrialists’ puritanism. This is not the place for a
narrative of the long persecution ; it is enough to say that by
about 1 900 town and country alike had been properly purged
of the magical art that had come to be known as folklore, ex-
cept for a few harmless and pitiful survivals. The attack on
magical art was over. The mind of the poor was a house
empty, swept, and garnished.

Then came amusement art. Football — mushroom amuse-
ment growth of what had, till lately, been a ritual practised
on religious feast-days in north-country towns — came first;
then came the cinema and the wireless; and the poor,
throughout the country, went amusement mad. But another
event was happening at the same time. Increased production
combined with the break-down of economic organization
led to the appearance of an unemployed class, forced un-
willingly into a parasitic condition, deprived of the magical
arts in which their grandfathers took their pleasure fifty
years ago, left functionless and aimless in the community,
living only to accept fanern et circenses , the dole and the
films.

Historical parallels are blind guides. There is no cer-
tainty that our civilization is tracing a path like that of the
later Roman Empire. But the parallel, so far as it has
yet developed, is alarmingly close. The disaster may be

1 Cf. R. C. K. Ensor, Oxford History of England, vol. xiv (1936), ch. iv, ix.

ART AS AMUSEMENT 103

preventive, but the danger is real. Is there anything we
can do?

There are certain things we need not try to do. Plato’s
remedy is no use. A dictator might try to close the cinemas,
shut down the wireless except for the transmission of his
own voice, confiscate the newspapers and magazines, and
in every possible way block the supplies of amusement.
But no such attempts would succeed, and no one clever
enough to become dictator would be fool enough to make
them. *

The highbrow remedy is no use. The masses of cinema
goers and magazine readers cannot be elevated by offering
them, instead of these democratic amusements, the aristo-
cratic amusements of a past age. This is called bringing art
to the people, but that is clap-trap ; what is brought is still
amusement, very cleverly designed by a Shakespeare or a
Purcell to please an Elizabethan or Restoration audience,
but now, for all its genius, far less amusing than Mickey
Mouse or jazz except to people laboriously trained to
enjoy it.

The folk-song remedy is no use. English folk-art was a
magical art, whose value to its possessors lay not in its
aesthetic merits (critics who quarrel about these merits need
not offer us their views) but in its traditional connexion with
the works and days of their calendar. Its possessors have
been robbed of it. The tradition has been broken. You
cannot mend a tradition, and you would be foolish to give it
back broken. Remorse is useless. There is nothing to be
done except face the fact.

The gunman’s remedy is no use. We need not buy
revolvers and rush off to do something drastic. What we are
concerned with is the threatened death of a civilization.
That has nothing to do with my death or yours, or the deaths
of any people we can shoot before they shoot us. It can be
neither arrested nor hastened by violence. Civilizations die
and are born not with waving of flags or the noise of machine-
guns in the streets, but in the dark, in a stillness, when no

ro4 ART AS AMUSEMENT

one is aware of it. It never gets into the papers. Long
afterwards a few people, looking back, begin to see that it
has happened.

Then let us get back to our business. We who write and
read this book are persons interested in art. We live in a
world where most of what goes by that name is amusement.
Here is our garden. It seems to need cultivating.

VI

ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION
§ x. The New Problem

We have finished at last with the technical theory of art, and
with the various kinds of art falsely so called to which it
correctly applies. We shall return to it in the future only so
far as it forces itself upon our notice and threatens to impede
the development of our subject.

That subject is art proper. It is true that we have already
been much concerned with this ; but only in a negative way.
We have been looking at it so far as was necessary in order
to exclude from it the various things which falsely claimed
inclusion in it. We must now turn to the positive side of this
same business, and ask what kinds of things they are to
which the name rightly belongs.

In doing this we are still dealing with what are called
questions of fact, or what in the first chapter were called
questions of usage, not with questions of theory. We shall
not be trying to build up an argument which the reader is
asked to examine and criticize, and accept if he finds no
fatal flaw in it. We shall not be offering him information
which he is asked to accept on the authority of witnesses. We
shall be trying as best we can to remind ourselves of facts
well known to us all : such facts as this, that on occasions of a
certain kind we actually do use the word art or some kindred
word to designate certain kinds of thing, and in the sense
which we have now isolated as the proper sense of the word.
Our business is to concentrate our attention on these usages
until we can see them as consistent and systematic. This
will be our work throughout this chapter and the next. The
task of defining the usages thus systematized, and so con-
structing a theory of art proper, will come later.

An appeal to facts is scientifically fertile only if the in-
quirer knows what precisely the questions are which he hopes

io6 ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION

that the appeal will answer. Our preliminary task, therefore,
is to define the questions which the collapse of the technical
theory has left confronting us. ‘That is easy,’ some one may
suggest; ‘the technical theory having collapsed, we begin
again at the beginning, with the same question once more
before us : What is art ?’

This is a complete misunderstanding. To a person who
knows his business as scientist, historian, philosopher, or
any kind of inquirer, the refutation of a false theory con-
stitutes a positive advance in his inquiry. It leaves him
confronted, not by the same old question over again, but by
a new question, more precise in its terms and therefore easier
to answer. This new question is based on what he has
learned from the theory he has refuted. If he has learned
nothing, this proves either that he is too foolish (or too
indolent) to learn, or that by an unfortunate error of judge-
ment he has been spending time on a theory so idiotic that
there is nothing to be learnt from it. Where the refuted
theory, even though untrue as a whole, is not completely
idiotic, and where the person who has refuted it is reasonably
intelligent and reasonably painstaking, the upshot of his
criticism can always be expressed in some such form as this:
‘The theory is untenable as regards its general conclusions;
but it has established certain points which must henceforth
be taken into account.’

It is easy to take up this attitude in, for example, historical
studies, where distinctions like that between the discovery
of a document and the interpretation put upon it are fairly
obvious, so that one historian criticizing the work of another
may say that he was altogether wrong in his general view of
a certain event, but the documents relating to it which he
discovered are a permanent addition to knowledge. In the
case of philosophical studies it is less easy, partly because
there are powerful motives for not even trying to do it.
Philosophers, especially those with an academic position,
inherit a long tradition of arguing for the sake of arguing;
even if they despair of reaching the truth, they think it a

ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION 107

matter of pride to make other philosophers look foolish. A
hankering for academic reputation turns them into a kind
of dialectical bravoes, who go about picking quarrels with
their fellow philosophers and running them through in
public, not for the sake of advancing knowledge, but in
order to decorate themselves with scalps. It is no wonder
that the subject they represent has been brought into dis-
credit with the general public and with students who have
been trained to care less for victory than for truth.

An erroneous philos®phical theory is based in the first
instance not on ignorance but on knowledge. The person
who constructs it begins by partially understanding the
subject, and goes on to distort what he knows by twisting
it into conformity with some preconceived idea. A theory
which has commended itself to a great many intelligent
people invariably expresses a high degree of insight into
the subject dealt with, and the distortion to which this has
been subjected is invariably thoroughgoing and systematic.
It therefore expresses many truths, but it cannot be dissected
into true statements and false statements; every statement
it contains has been falsified; if the truth which underlies it
is to be separated out from the falsehood, a special method of
analysis must be used. This consists in isolating the pre-
conceived idea which has acted as the distorting agent,
reconstructing the formula of the distortion, and re-applying
it so as to correct the distortion and thus find out what it was
that the people who invented or accepted the theory were
trying to say. In proportion as the theory has been more
widely accepted, and by more intelligent persons, the likeli-
hood is greater that the results of this analysis will be found
useful as a starting-point for further inquiries.

This method will now be applied to the technical theory
of art. The formula for the distortion is known from our
analysis of the notion of craft in Chapter II, § 1. Because
the inventors of the theory were prejudiced in favour of that
notion, they forced their own ideas about art into conformity
with it. The central and primary characteristic of craft is the

xo8 ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION

distinction it involves between means and end. If art is to
be conceived as craft, it must likewise be divisible into means
and end. We have seen that actually it is not so divisible;
but we have now to ask why anybody ever thought it was.
What is there in the case of art which these people mis-
understood by assimilating it to the well-known distinction
of means and end? If there is nothing, the technical theory
of art was a gratuitous and baseless invention; those who
have stated and accepted it have been and are nothing but
a pack of fools ; and we have been wasting our time thinking
about it. These are hypotheses I do not propose to adopt.

(1) This, then, is the first point we have learnt from our
criticism: that there is in art proper a distinction resembling
that between means and end, but not identical with it.

( 2 ) The element which the technical theory calls the end
is defined by it as the arousing of emotion. The idea of
arousing (i.e. of bringing into existence, by determinate
means, something whose existence is conceived in advance
as possible and desirable) belongs to the philosophy of craft,
and is obviously borrowed thence. But the same is not true
of emotion. This, then, is our second point. Art has some-
thing to do with emotion; what it does with it has a certain
resemblance to arousing it, but is not arousing it.

(3) What the technical theory calls the means is defined
by it as the making of an artifact called a work of art. The
making of this artifact is described according to the terms
of the philosophy of craft : i.e. as the transformation of a given
raw material by imposing on it a form preconceived as a plan
in the maker’s mind. To get the distortion out of this we
must remove all these characteristics of craft, and thus we
reach the third point. Art has something to do with making
things, but these things are not material things, made by im-
posing form on matter, and they are not made by skill. They
are things of some other kind, and made in some other way.

We now have three riddles to answer. For the present,
no attempt will be made to answer the first: we shall treat
it merely as a hint that the second and third should be treated

ART PROPER: ( i) AS EXPRESSION 109

separately. In this chapter, accordingly, we shall inquire
into the relation between art and emotion ; in the next, the
relation between art and making.

§ 1. Expressing Emotion and Arousing Emotion

Our first question is this. Since the artist proper has some-
thing to do with emotion, and what he does with it is not to
arouse it, what is it that he does ? It will be remembered that
the kind of answer we expect to this question is an answer
derived from what we all know and all habitually say; nothing
original or recondite, but something entirely commonplace.

Nothing could be more entirely commonplace than to say
he expresses them. The idea is familiar to every artist, and
to every one else who has any acquaintance with the arts.
To state it is not to state a philosophical theory or definition
of art; it is to state a fact or supposed fact about which, when
we have sufficiently identified it, we shall have later to
theorize philosophically. For the present it does not matter
whether the fact that is alleged, when it is said that the artist
expresses emotion, is really a fact or only supposed to be one.
Whichever it is, we have to identify it, that is, to decide what
it is that people are saying when they use the phrase. Later on,
we shall have to see whether it will fit into a coherent theory.

They are referring to a situation, real or supposed, of a
definite kind. When a man is said to express emotion, what
is being said about him comes to this. At first, he is con-
scious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this
emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excite-
ment, which he feels going on within him, but of whose
nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say
about his emotion is: ‘I feel ... I don’t know what I feel.’
From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates
himself by doing something which we call expressing him-
self. This is an activity which has something to do with the
thing we call language : he expresses himself by speaking.
It has also something to do with consciousness : the emotion
expressed is an emotion of whose nature the person who feels

443« X

no

ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION
it is no longer unconscious. It has also something to do with
the way in which he feels the emotion. As unexpressed, he
feels it in what we have called a helpless and oppressed way;
as expressed, he feels it in a way from which this sense of
oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened
and eased.

This lightening of emotions which is somehow connected
with the expression of them has a certain resemblance to the
‘catharsis’ by which emotions are earthed through being
discharged into a make-believe situation ; but the two things
are not the same. Suppose the emotion is one of anger. If
it is effectively earthed, for example by fancying oneself
kicking some one down stairs, it is thereafter no longer
present in the mind as anger at all : we have worked it off
and are rid of it. If it is expressed, for example by putting
it into hot and bitter words, it does not disappear from the
mind ; we remain angry ; but instead of the sense of oppression
which accompanies an emotion of anger not yet recognized as
such, we have that sense of alleviation which comes when we
are conscious of our own emotion as anger, instead of being
conscious of it only as an unidentified perturbation. This is
what we refer to when we say that it ‘does us good’ to express
our emotions.

The expression of an emotion by speech may be addressed
to some one; but if so it is not done with the intention of
arousing a like emotion in him. If there is any effect which
we wish to produce in the hearer, it is only the effect which
we call making him understand how we feel. But, as we have
already seen, this is just the effect which expressing our
emotions has on ourselves. It makes us, as well as the people
to whom we talk, understand how we feel. A person arous-
ing emotion sets out to affect his audience in a way in which
he himself is not necessarily affected. He and his audience
stand in quite different relations to the act, very much as
physician and patient stand in quite different relations to-
wards a drug administered by the one and taken by the other.
A person expressing emotion, on the contrary, is treating

Ill

ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION
himself and his audience in the same kind of way; he is
making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what
he is doing to himself.

It follows from this that the expression of emotion, simply
as expression, is not addressed to any particular audience.
It is addressed primarily to the speaker himself, and secon-
darily to any one who can understand. Here again, the
speaker’s attitude towards his audience is quite unlike that
of a person desiring to arouse in his audience a certain
emotion. If that is whaS he wishes to do, he must know the
audience he is addressing. He must know what type of
stimulus will produce the desired kind of reaction in people
of that particular sort; and he must adapt his language to
his audience in the sense of making sure that it contains
stimuli appropriate to their peculiarities. If what he wishes
to do is to express his emotions intelligibly, he has to express
them in such a way as to be intelligible to himself; his audi-
ence is then in the position of persons who overhear 1 him
doing this. Thus the stimulus-and-reaction terminology has
no applicability to the situation.

The means-and-end, or technique, terminology too is
inapplicable. Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does
not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is
therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying
to find out what these emotions are. There is certainly here
a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain
end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived,
to which appropriate means can be thought out in the light
of our knowledge of its special character. Expression is an
activity of which there can be no technique.

§ 3. Expression and Individualization

Expressing an emotion is not the same thing as describing
it. To say ‘I am angry’ is to describe one’s emotion, not to

1 Further development of the ideas expressed in this paragraph will make
it necessary .to qualify this word and assert a much more intimate relation
between artist and audience; see pp. 311-36.

i iz ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION

express it. The words in which it is expressed need not
contain any reference to anger as such at all. Indeed, so far as
they simply and solely express it, they cannot contain any
such reference. The curse of Ernulphus, as invoked by
Dr. Slop on the unknown person who tied certain knots,
is a classical and supreme expression of anger; but it does
not contain a single word descriptive of the emotion it
expresses.

This is why, as literary critics well know, the use of epithets
in poetry, or even in prose where expressiveness is aimed at,,
is a danger. If you want to express the terror which some-
thing causes, you must not give it an epithet like ‘dreadful’.
For that describes the emotion instead of expressing it, and
your language becomes frigid, that is inexpressive, at once.
A genuine poet, in his moments of genuine poetry, never
mentions by name the emotions he is expressing.

Some people have thought that a poet who wishes to
express a great variety of subtly differentiated emotions
might be hampered by the lack of a vocabulary rich in words
referring to the distinctions between them; and that psycho-
logy, by working out such a vocabulary, might render a
valuable service to poetry. This is the opposite of the truth.
The poet needs no such words at all ; the existence or non-
existence of a scientific terminology describing the emotions
he wishes to express is to him a matter of perfect indifference.
If such a terminology, where it exists, is allowed to affect his
own use of language, it affects it for the worse.

The reason why description, so far from helping expres-
sion, actually damages it, is that description generalizes. To
describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind:
to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression,
on the contrary, individualizes. The anger which I feel here
and now, with a certain person, for a certain cause, is no doubt
an instance of anger, and in describing it as anger one is
telling truth about it; but it is much more than mere anger:
it is a peculiar anger, not quite like any anger that I ever
felt before, and probably not quite like any anger I shall ever

ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION 113

feel again. To become fully conscious of it means becoming
conscious of it not merely as an instance of anger, but as this
quite peculiar anger. Expressing it, we saw, has something
to do with becoming conscious of it; therefore, if being fully
conscious of it means being conscious of all its peculiarities,
fully expressing it means expressing all its peculiarities. The
poet, therefore, in proportion as he understands his business,
gets as far away as possible from merely labelling his
emotions as instances of this or that general kind, and takes
enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them
in terms which reveal their difference from any other
emotion of the same sort.

This is a point in which art proper, as the expression of
emotion, differs sharply and obviously from any craft whose
aim it is to arouse emotion. The end which a craft sets out
to realize is always conceived in general terms, never
individualized. However accurately defined it may be, it is
always defined as the production of a thing having charac-
teristics that could be shared by other things. A joiner,
making a table out of these pieces of wood and no others,
makes it to measurements and specifications which, even if
actually shared by no other table, might in principle be
shared by other tables. A physician treating a patient for a
certain complaint is trying to produce in him a condition
which might be, and probably has been, often produced in
others, namely, the condition of recovering from that com-
plaint. So an ‘artist’ setting out to produce a certain emotion
in his audience is setting out to produce not an individual
emotion, but an emotion of a certain kind. It follows that
the means appropriate to its production will be not individual
means but means of a certain kind: that is to say, means
which are always in principle replaceable by other similar
means. As every good craftsman insists, there is always a
‘right way’ of performing any operation. A ‘way’ of acting
is a general pattern to which various individual actions may
conform. In order that the ‘work of art’ should produce its
intended psychological effect, therefore, whether this effect

1 14 ART PROPER :( i) AS EXPRESSION

be magical or merely amusing, what is necessary is that it
should satisfy certain conditions, possess certain character-
istics : in other words be, not this work and no other, but a
work of this kind and of no other.

This explains the meaning of the generalization which
Aristotle and others have ascribed to art. We have already
seen that Aristotle’s Poetics is concerned not with art proper
but with representative art, and representative art of one
definite kind. He is not analysing the religious drama of
a hundred years before, he is analysing the amusement
literature of the fourth century, and giving rules for its
composition. The end being not individual but general (the
production of an emotion of a certain kind) the means too
are general (the portrayal, not of this individual act, but of an
act of this sort; not, as he himself puts it, what Alcibiades
did, but what anybody of a certain kind would do). Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s idea of generalization is in principle the
same; he expounds it in connexion with what he calls ‘the
grand style’, which means a style intended to produce
emotions of a certain type. He is quite right; if you want to
produce a typical case of a certain emotion, the way to do it
is to put before your audience a representation of the typical
features belonging to the kind of thing that produces it:
make your kings very royal, your soldiers very soldierly,
your women very feminine, your cottages very cottagesque,
your oak-trees very oakish, and so on.

Art proper, as expression of emotion, has nothing to do with
all this. The artist proper is a person who, grappling with
the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want
to get this clear.’ It is no use to him to get something else
clear, however like it this other thing may be. Nothing will
serve as a substitute. He does not want a thing of a certain
kind, he wants a certain thing. This is why the kind of person
who takes his literature as psychology, saying ‘How ad-
mirably this writer depicts the feelings of women, or bus-
drivers, or homosexuals . . .’, necessarily misunderstands
every real work of art with which he comes into contact,

ART PROPER :( i) AS EXPRESSION 115

and takes for good art, with infallible precision, what is
not art at all.

§ 4. Selection and Aesthetic Emotion

It has sometimes been asked whether emotions can be
divided into those suitable for expression by artists and those
unsuitable. If by art one means art proper, and identifies
this with expression, the only possible answer is that there
can be no such distinction. Whatever is expressible is
expressible. There may be ulterior motives in special cases
which make it desirable to express some emotions and not
others; but only if by ‘express’ one means express publicly,
that is, allow people to overhear one expressing oneself.
This is because one cannot possibly decide that a certain
emotion is one which for some reason it would be undesirable
to express thus publicly, unless one first becomes conscious
of it; and doing this, as we saw, is somehow bound up with
expressing it. If art means the expression of emotion, the
artist as such must be absolutely candid ; his speech must be
absolutely free. This is not a precept, it is a statement. It
does not mean that the artist ought to be candid, it means that
he is an artist only in so far as he is candid. Any kind of
selection, any decision to express this emotion and not that,
is inartistic not in the sense that it damages the perfect
sincerity which distinguishes good art from bad, but in the
sense that it represents a further process of a non-artistic
kind, carried out when the work of expression proper is
already complete. For until that work is complete one
does not know what emotions one feels; and is therefore
not in a position to pick and choose, and give one of them
preferential treatment.

From these considerations a certain corollary follows about
the division of art into distinct arts. Two such divisions are
current: one according to the medium in which the artist
works, into painting, poetry, music, and the like; the other
according to the kind of emotion he expresses, into tragic,
comic, and so forth. We are concerned with the second.

u6 ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION

If the difference between tragedy and comedy is a difference
between the emotions they express, it is not a difference that
can be present to the artist’s mind when he is beginning his
work; if it were, he would know what emotion he was going
to express before he had expressed it. No artist, therefore,
so far as he is an artist proper, can set out to write a comedy,
a tragedy, an elegy, or the like. So far as he is an artist
proper, he is just as likely to write any one of these as any
other; which is the truth that Socrates was heard expounding
towards the dawn, among the sleeping figures in Agathon’s
dining-room . 1 These distinctions, therefore, have only a
very limited value. They can be properly used in two ways,
(i) When a work of art is complete, it can be labelled ex post
facto as tragic, comic, or the like, according to the character
of the emotions chiefly expressed in it. But understood in
that sense the distinction is of no real importance. (2) If we
are talking about representational art, the case is very
different. Here the so-called artist knows in advance what
kind of emotion he wishes to excite, and will construct works
of different kinds according to the different kinds of effect
they are to produce. In the case of representational art,
therefore, distinctions of this kind are not only admissible
as an ex post facto classification of things to which in their
origin it is alien ; they are present from the beginning as a
determining factor in the so-called artist’s plan of work.

The same considerations provide an answer to the ques-
tion whether there is such a thing as a specific ‘aesthetic
emotion’. If it is said that there is such an emotion inde-
pendently of its expression in art, and that the business of

* Plato, Symposium, 223 d. But if Aristodemus heard him correctly,
Socrates was saying the right thing for the wrong reason. He is reported as
arguing, not that a tragic writer as such is also a comic one, but that 6 •rfxvij
Tpayco2oTrai6$ is also a comic writer. Emphasis on the word t^xvt^ is obviously
implied; and this, with a reference to the doctrine {Republic, 333 e — 334 a)
that craft is what Aristotle was to call a potentiality of opposites, i.e. enables
its possessor to do not one kind of thing only, but that kind and the opposite
kind too, shows that what Socrates was doing was to assume the technical
theory of art and draw from it the above conclusion.

ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION 117

artists is to express it, we must answer that such a view is
nonsense. It implies, first, that artists have emotions of
various kinds, among which is this peculiar aesthetic emo-
tion; secondly, that they select this aesthetic emotion for
expression. If the first proposition were true, the second
would have to be false. If artists only find out what their
emotions are in the course of finding out how to express them,
they cannot begin the work of expression by deciding what
emotion to express.

In a different sense, ^however, it is true that there is a
specific aesthetic emotion. As we have seen, an unexpressed
emotion is accompanied by a feeling of oppression; when
it is expressed and thus comes into consciousness the same
emotion is accompanied by a new feeling of alleviation or
easement, the sense that this oppression is removed. It
resembles the feeling of relief that comes when a burdensome
intellectual or moral problem has been solved. We may call
it, if we like, the specific feeling of having successfully
expressed ourselves; and there is no reason why it should not
be called a specific aesthetic emotion. But it is not a specific
kind of emotion pre-existing to the expression of it, and
having the peculiarity that when it comes to be expressed it
is expressed artistically. It is an emotional colouring which
attends the expression of any emotion whatever.

§ 5. The Artist and the Ordinary Man

I have been speaking of ‘the artist’, in the present chap-
ter, as if artists were persons of a special kind, differing some-
how either in mental endowment or at least in the way they
use their endowment from the ordinary persons who make
up their audience. But this segregation of artists from or-
dinary human beings belongs to the conception of art as
craft; it cannot be reconciled with the conception of art as
expression. If art were a kind of craft, it would follow as a
matter of course. Any craft is a specialized form of skill,
and those who possess it are thereby marked out from the
rest of mankind. If art is the skill to amuse people, or in

1x8 ART PROPER : (x) AS EXPRESSION

general to arouse emotions in them, the amusers and the
amused form two different classes, differing in their respec-
tively active and passive relation to the craft of exciting
determinate emotions; and this difference will be due,
according to whether the artist is ‘born’ or ‘made’, either to
a specific mental endowment in the artist, which in theories
of this type has gone by the name of ‘genius’, or to a specific
training.

If art is not a kind of craft, but the expression of emotion,
this distinction of kind between artist and audience disap-
pears. For the artist has an audience only in so far as people
hear him expressing himself, and understand what they
hear him saying. Now, if one person says something by way
of expressing what is in his mind, and another hears and
understands him, the hearer who understands him has that
same thing in his mind. The question whether he would
have had it if the first had not spoken need not here be
raised; however it is answered, what has just been said is
equally true. If some one says ‘Twice two is four’ in the
hearing of some one incapable of carrying out the simplest
arithmetical operation, he will be understood by himself,
but not by his hearer. The hearer can understand only if he
can add two and two in his own mind. Whether he could
do it before he heard the speaker say those words makes no
difference. What is here said of expressing thoughts is
equally true of expressing emotions. If a poet expresses, for
example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can
understand him are those who are capable of experiencing
that kind of fear themselves. Hence, when some one reads
and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the
poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is expressing
emotions of his own in the poet’s words, which have thus
become his own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man
for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets. We know that
he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling
us to express ours.

Thus, if art is the activity of expressing emotions, the

ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION 119

reader is an artist as well as the writer. There is no distinction
of kind between artist and audience. This does not mean that
there is no distinction at all. When Pope wrote that the
poet’s business was to say ‘what all have felt but none so well
express’d’, we may interpret his words as meaning (whether
or no Pope himself consciously meant this when he wrote
them) that the poet’s difference from his audience lies in the
fact that, though both do exactly the same thing, namely
express this particular emotion in these particular words,
the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem
of expressing it, whereas the audience can express it only
when the poet has shown them how. The poet is not singular
either in his having that emotion or in his power of expressing
it; he is singular in his ability to take the initiative in ex-
pressing what all feel, and all can express.

§6. The Curse of the Ivory Tower

I have already had occasion to criticize the view that artists
can or should form a special order or caste, marked off by
special genius or special training from the rest of the
community. That view, we have seen, was a by-product of
the technical theory of art. This criticism can now be rein-
forced by pointing out that a segregation of this kind is not
only unnecessary but fatal to the artist’s real function. If
artists are really to express ‘what all have felt’, they must
share the emotions of all. Their experiences, the general
attitude they express towards life, must be of the same
kind as that of the persons among whom they hope to find
an audience. If they form themselves into a special clique,
the emotions they express will be the emotions of that clique;
and the consequence will be that their work becomes
intelligible only to their fellow artists. This is in fact what
happened to a great extent during the nineteenth century,
when the segregation of artists from the rest of mankind
reached its culmination.

If art had really been a craft, like medicine or warfare,
the effect of this segregation would have been all to the good,

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ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION
for a craft only becomes more efficient if it organizes itself
into the shape of a community devoted to serving the interests
of the public in a specialized way, and planning its whole
life with an eye to the conditions of this service. Because it
is not a craft, but the expression of emotions, the effect was
the opposite of this. A situation arose in which novelists,
for example, found themselves hardly at their ease except
in writing novels about novelists, which appealed to nobody
except other novelists. This vicious circle was most con-
spicuous in certain continental writers like Anatole France
or D’Annunzio, whose subject-matter often seemed to be
limited by the limits of the segregated clique of ‘intellectuals’.
The corporate life of the artistic community became a kind
of ivory tower whose prisoners could think and talk of
nothing except themselves, and had only one another for
audience.

Transplanted into the more individualistic atmosphere of
England, the result was different. Instead of a single
(though no doubt subdivided) clique of artists, all inhabiting
the same ivory tower, the tendency was for each artist to
construct an ivory tower of his own : to live, that is to say,
in a world of his own devising, cut off not only from the
ordinary world of common people but even from the corre-
sponding worlds of other artists. Thus Burne-Jones lived
in a world whose contents were ungraciously defined by a
journalist as ‘green light and gawky girls’; Leighton in a
world of sham Hellenism; and it was the call of practical life
that rescued Yeats from the sham world of his youthful
Celtic twilight, forced him into the clear air of real Celtic
life, and made him a great poet.

In these ivory towers art languished. The reason is not
hard to understand. A man might easily have been born and
bred within the confines of a society as narrow and special-
ized as any nineteenth-century artistic coterie, thinking its
thoughts and feeling its emotions because his experience
contained no others. Such a man, in so far as he expressed
these emotions, would be genuinely expressing his own

1 21

ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION
experience. The narrowness or wideness of the experience
which an artist expresses has nothing to do with the merits
of his art. A Jane Austen, born and bred in an atmosphere
of village gossip, can make great art out of the emotions that
atmosphere generates. But a person who shuts himself up
in the limits of a narrow coterie has an experience which
includes the emotions of the larger world in which he was
born and bred, as well as those of the little society he has
chosen to join. If he decides to express only the emotions
that pass current within the limits of that little society, he is
selecting certain of his emotions for expression. The reason
why this inevitably produces bad art is that, as we have
already seen, it can only be done when the person selecting
already knows what his emotions are; that is, has already
expressed them. His real work as an artist is a work which,
as a member of his artistic coterie, he repudiates. Thus the
literature of the ivory tower is a literature whose only possible
value is an amusement value by which persons imprisoned
within that tower, whether by their misfortune or their
fault, help themselves and each other to pass their time with-
out dying of boredom or of home-sickness for the world they
have left behind; together with a magical value by which
they persuade themselves and each other that imprisonment
in such a place and in such company is a high privilege.
Artistic value it has none.

§ 7. Expressing Emotion and Betraying Emotion

Finally, the expressing of emotion must not be confused
with what may be called the betraying of it, that is, exhibiting
symptoms of it. When it is said that the artist in the proper
sense of that word is a person who expresses his emotions,
this does not mean that if he is afraid he turns pale and
stammers; if he is angry he turns red and bellows; and so
forth. These things are no doubt called expressions; but
just as we distinguish proper and improper senses of the
word ‘art’, so we must distinguish proper and improper senses
of the word ‘expression’, and in the context of a discussion

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ART PROPER : (i) AS EXPRESSION
about art this sense of expression is an improper sense. The
characteristic mark of expression proper is lucidity or
intelligibility; a person who expresses something thereby
becomes conscious of what it is that he is expressing, and
enables others to become conscious of it in himself and in
them. Turning pale and stammering is a natural accom-
paniment of fear, but a person who in addition to being
afraid also turns pale and stammers does not thereby become
conscious of the precise quality of his emotion. About that
he is as much in the dark as he would be if (were that possible)
he could feel fear without also exhibiting these symptoms
of it. .

Confusion between these two senses of the word ‘expres-
sion’ may easily lead to false critical estimates, and so to
false aesthetic theory. It is sometimes thought a merit in an
actress that when she is acting a pathetic scene she can work
herself up to such an extent as to weep real tears. There may
be some ground for that opinion if acting is not an art but a
craft, and if the actress’s object in that scene is to produce
grief in her audience; and even then the conclusion would
follow only if it were true that grief cannot be produced in
the audience unless symptoms of grief are exhibited by the
performer. And no doubt this is how most people think
of the actor’s work. But if his business is not amusement but
art, the object at which he is aiming is not to produce a
preconceived emotional effect on his audience but by means
of a system of expressions, or language, composed partly of
speech and partly of gesture, to explore his own emotions:
to discover emotions in himself of which he was unaware,
and, by permitting the audience to witness the discovery,
enable them to make a similar discovery about themselves.
In that case it is not her ability to weep real tears that would
mark out a good actress; it is her ability to make it clear to
herself and her audience what the tears are about.

This applies to every kind of art. The artist never rants.
A person who writes or paints or the like in order to blow
off steam, using the traditional materials of art as means for

ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION 123

exhibiting the symptoms of emotion, may deserve praise
as an exhibitionist, but loses for the moment all claim to the
title of artist. Exhibitionists have their uses ; they may serve
as an amusement, or they may be doing magic. The second
category will contain, for example, those young men who,
learning in the torment of their own bodies and minds what
war is like, have stammered their indignation in verses, and
published them in the hope of infecting others and causing
them to abolish it. But these verses have nothing to do with
poetry. ,

Thomas Hardy, at the end of a fine and tragic novel in
which he has magnificently expressed his sorrow and indigna-
tion for the suffering inflicted by callous sentimentalism on
trusting innocence, spoils everything by a last paragraph
fastening his accusation upon ‘the president of the immortals’.
The note rings false, not because it is blasphemous (it offends
no piety worthy of the name), but because it is rant. The
case against God, so far as it exists, is complete already. The
concluding paragraph adds nothing to it. All it does is to
spoil the effect of the indictment by betraying a symptom
of the emotion which the whole book has already expressed;
as if a prosecuting counsel, at the end of his speech, spat in
the prisoner’s face.

The same fault is especially common in Beethoven. He
was confirmed in it, no doubt, by his deafness; but the cause
of it was not his deafness but a temperamental inclination
to rant. It shows itself in the way his music screams and
mutters instead of speaking, as in the soprano part of the
Mass in D, or the layout of the opening page in the Hammer-
klavier Sonata. He must have known his failing and tried to
overcome it, or he would never have spent so many of his
ripest years among string quartets, where screaming and
muttering are almost, one might say, physically impossible.
Yet even there, the old Adam struts out in certain passages
of the Grosse Fuge.

It does not, of course, follow that a dramatic writer may
not rant in character. The tremendous rant at the end of

124 ART PROPER: (i) AS EXPRESSION

The Ascent of F6, like the Shakespearian 1 ranting on which it
is modelled, is done with tongue in cheek. It is not the
author who is ranting, but the unbalanced character he
depicts; the emotion the author is expressing is the emotion
with which he contemplates that character; or rather, the
emotion he has towards that secret and disowned part of
himself for which the character stands.

1 Shakespeare’s characters rant (i) when they are characters in which he
takes no interest at all, but which he uses simply as pegs on which to hang
what the public wants, like Henry V; (2) when they are meant to be despi-
cable, like Pistol; or (3) when they have lost their heads, like Hamlet in the
graveyard.

VII

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION
§ 1. The Problem Defined

The next question in the programme laid down at the begin-
ning of the preceding chapter was put in this way : What is a
work of art, granted that there is something in art proper (not
only in art falsely so called) to which that name is applied,
and that, since art is not craft, this thing is not an arti-
fact ? It is something made by the artist, but not made by
transforming a given raw material, nor by carrying out a
preconceived plan, nor by way of realizing the means to
a preconceived end. What is this kind of making?

Here are two questions which, however closely they are
connected, we shall do well to consider separately. We had
better begin with the artist, and put the second question first.
I shall therefore begin by asking: What is the nature of
this making which is not technical making, or, if we want
a one-word name for it, not fabrication ? It is important not
to misunderstand the question. When we asked what
expression was, in the preceding chapter, it was pointed out
that the writer was not trying to construct an argument in-
tended to convince the reader, nor to offer him information,
but to remind him of what (if he is a person whose experience
of the subject-matter has been sufficient to qualify him for
reading books of this kind) he knows already. So here. We
are not asking for theories but for facts. And the facts for
which we are asking are not recondite facts. They are facts
well known to the reader. The order of facts to which they
belong may be indicated by saying that they are the ways in
which all of us who are concerned with art habitually think
about it, and the ways in which we habitually express our
thoughts in ordinary speech. .

By way of making this clearer, I will indicate the kind of
way in which our question cannot be answered. A great

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126 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

many people who have put to themselves the question ‘What
is this making, characteristic of the artist, which is not a
fabrication?’ have sought an answer in some such way as
the following: ‘This non-technical making is plainly not an
accidental making, for works of art could not be produced
by accident . 1 Something must be in control. But if this is
not the artist’s skill, it cannot be his reason or will or con-
sciousness. It must therefore be something else; either some
controlling force outside the artist, in which case we may
call it inspiration, or something inside him but other than
his will and so forth. This must be either his body, in which
case the production of a work of art is at bottom a physio-
logical activity, or else it is something mental but uncon-
scious, in which case the productive force is the artist’s
unconscious mind.’

Many imposing theories of art have been built on these
foundations. The first alternative, that the artist’s activity
is controlled by some divine or at least spiritual being that
uses him as its mouthpiece, is out of fashion to-day, but
that is no reason why we should refuse it a hearing. It does
at least fit the facts better than most of the theories of art
nowadays current. The second alternative, that the artist’s
work is controlled by forces which, though part of him-
self and specifically part of his mind, are not voluntary
and not conscious, but work in some mental cellar unseen
and unbidden by the dwellers in the house above, is extremely

1 I am talking of quite sensible people. There are others; some of them
have denied this proposition, pointing out that if a monkey played with a
typewriter for long enough, rattling the keys at random, there is a calculable
probability that within a certain time he would produce, purely by accident,
the complete text of Shakespeare. Any reader who has nothing to do can
amuse himself by calculating how long it would take for the probability to
be worth betting on. But the interest of the suggestion lies in the revelation
of the mental state of a person who can identify the ‘works’ of Shakespeare
with the series of letters printed on the pages of a book bearing that phrase
as its title; and thinks, if he can be said to think at all, that an archaeologist
of 10,000 years hence, recovering a complete text of Shakespeare from the
sands of Egypt but unable to read a single word of English, would possess
Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic works.

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 127

popular; not among artists, but among psychologists and
their numerous disciples, who handle the theory with a great
deal of confidence and seem to believe that by its means the
riddle of art has at last been solved . 1 The third alternative
was popular with the physiological psychologists of the last
century, and Grant Allen still remains its best exponent.

It would be waste of time to criticize these theories. The
question about them is not whether they are good or bad,
considered as examples of theorizing; but whether the
problem which they are rneant to solve is one that calls for
theorizing in order to solve it. A person who cannot find
his spectacles on the table may invent any number of theories
to account for their absence. They may have been spirited
away by a benevolent deity, to prevent him from over-
working, or by a malicious demon, to interfere with his
studies, or by a neighbouring mahatma, to convince him
that such things can be done. He may have unconsciously
made away with them himself, because they unconsciously
remind him of his oculist, who unconsciously reminds him
of his father, whom he unconsciously hates. Or he may
have pushed them off the table while moving a book. But
these theories, however ingenious and sublime, are pre-
mature if the spectacles should happen to be on his nose.

Theories professing to explain how works of art are con-
structed by means of hypotheses like these are based on
recollecting that the spectacles are not on the table, and
overlooking the fact that they are on the nose. Those who
put them forward have not troubled to ask themselves
whether we are in point of fact familiar with a kind of
activity productive of results and under the agent’s voluntary

1 Mr. Robert Graves ( Poetic Unreason , 1925) is almost the only practising
man of letters or artist in this country who has come forward to back up the
psychologists. Generally speaking, the judgement of literary men on the
qualifications of the people who advocate this theory is sufficiently represented
by Dr. I. A. Richards: ‘To judge by the published work of Freud upon
Leonardo da Vinci or of Jung upon Goethe (e.g. The Psychology of the
Unconscious , p. 305) psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics’
( Principles of Literary Criticism , ed. 5, 1934, pp. 29-30).

128 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

control, which has none of the special characteristics of craft.
If they had asked the question, they must have answered it
in the affirmative. We are perfectly familiar with activities
of this kind; and our ordinary name for them is creation.

§ 2. Making and Creating

Before we ask what in general are the occasions on which
we use this word, we must forestall a too probable objection
to the word itself. Readers suffering from theophobia will
certainly by now have taken offence. Knowing as they do that
theologians use it for describing the relation of God to the
world, victims of this disease smell incense whenever they
hear it spoken, and think it a point of honour that it shall
never sully their lips or ears. They will by now have on the
tips of their tongues all the familiar protests against an
aesthetic mysticism that raises the function of art to the level
of something divine and identifies the artist with God.
Perhaps some day, with an eye on the Athanasian Creed,
they will pluck up courage to excommunicate an arithmetician
who uses the word three. Meanwhile, readers willing to
understand words instead of shying at them will recollect
that the word ‘create’ is daily used in contexts that offer no
valid ground for a fit of odium theologicum. If a witness in
court says that a drunken man was creating a noise, or that a
dance club has created a nuisance, if an historian says that
somebody or other created the English navy or the Fascist
state, if a publicist says that secret diplomacy creates inter-
national distrust, or the chairman of a company says that
increased attention to advertisement will create an increased
demand for its produce, no one expects a little man at the
back of the room to jump up and threaten to leave unless
the word is withdrawn. If he did, the stewards would throw
him out for creating a disturbance.

To create something means to make it non-technically,
but yet consciously and voluntarily. Originally, creare means
to generate, or make offspring, for which we still use its
compound ‘procreate,’ and the Spaniards have criatura , for

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 129

a child. The act of procreation is a voluntary act, and
those who do it are responsible for what they are doing;
but it is not done by any specialized form of skill. It
need not be done (as it may be in the case of a royal
marriage) as a means to any preconceived end. It need
not be done (as it was by Mr. Shandy senior) according
to any preconceived plan. It cannot be done (whatever
Aristotle may say) by imposing a new form on any pre-
existing matter. It is in this sense that we speak of creating
a disturbance or a demand or a political system. The person
who makes these things is acting voluntarily; he is acting
responsibly; but he need not be acting in order to achieve
any ulterior end; he need not be following a preconceived
plan; and he is certainly not transforming anything that
can properly be called a raw material. It is in the same sense
that Christians asserted, and neo-Platonists denied, that God
created the world.

This being the established meaning of the word, it should
be clear that when we speak of an artist as making a poem,
or a play, or a painting, or a piece of music, the kind of mak-
ing to which we refer is the kind we call creating. For, as we
already know, these things, in so far as they are works of art
proper, are not made as means to an end ; they are not made
according to any preconceived plan; and they are not made
by imposing a new form upon a given matter. Yet they are
made deliberately and responsibly, by people who know what
they are doing, even though they do not know in advance
what is going to come of it.

The creation which theologians ascribe to God is peculiar
in one way and only one. The peculiarity of the act by
which God is said to create the world is sometimes supposed
to lie in this, that God is said to create the world ‘out of
nothing’, that is to say, without there being previously any
matter upon which he imposes a new form. But that is a
confusion of thought. In that sense, all creation is creation
out of nothing. The peculiarity which is really ascribed
to God is that in the case of his act there lacks not only a

1 3 o ART PROPER : (2) AS IMAGINATION

prerequisite in the shape of a matter to be transformed, but
any prerequisite of any kind whatsoever. This would not
apply to the creation of a child, or a nuisance, or a work of
art. In order that a child should be created, there must be a
whole world of organic and inorganic matter, not because
the parents fabricate the child out of this matter, but because
a child can come into existence, as indeed its parents can exist,
only in such a world. In order that a nuisance should be
created, there must be persons capable of being annoyed,
and the person who creates the nuisance must already be
acting in a manner which, if modified this way or that, would
annoy them. In order that a work of art should be created,
the prospective artist (as we saw in the preceding chapter)
must have in him certain unexpressed emotions, and must
also have the wherewithal to express them. In these cases,
where creation is done by finite beings, it is obvious that
these beings, because finite, must first be in circumstances
that enable them to create. Because God is conceived as an
infinite being, the creation ascribed to him is conceived as
requiring no such conditions.

Hence, when I speak of the artist’s relation to his works
of art as that of a creator, I am not giving any excuse to
unintelligent persons who think, whether in praise or dis-
praise of my notions, that I am raising the function of art
to the level of something divine or making the artist into
a kind of God.

§ 3. Creation and Imagination

We must proceed to a further distinction. All the things
taken above as examples of things created are what we
ordinarily call real things. A work of art need not be what
we should call a real thing. It may be what we call an
imaginary thing. A disturbance, or a nuisance, or a navy,
or the like, is not created at all until it is created as a thing
having its place in the real world. But a work of art may be
completely created when it has been created as a thing whose
only place is in the artist’s mind.

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 131

Here, I am afraid, it is the metaphysician who will take
offence. He will remind me that the distinction between real
things and things that exist only in our minds is one to which
he and his fellows have given a great deal of attention. They
have thought about it so long and so intently that it has lost
all meaning. Some of them have decided that the things
we call real are only in our minds ; others that the things we
describe as being in our minds are thereby implied to be just
as real as anything else. These two sects, it appears, are
engaged in a truceless war, and any one who butts in by
using the words about which they are fighting will be set
upon by both sides and torn to pieces.

I do not hope to placate these gentlemen. I can only cheer
myself up by reflecting that even if I go on with what I was
saying they cannot eat me. If an engineer has decided how
to build a bridge, but has not made any drawings or speci-
fications for it on paper, and has not discussed his plan with
any one or taken any steps towards carrying it out, we are
in the habit of saying that the bridge exists only in his mind,
or (as we also say) in his head. When the bridge is built, we
say that it exists not only in his head but in the real world.
A bridge which ‘exists only in the engineer’s head’ we also
call an imaginary bridge ; one which ‘exists in the real world’
we call a real bridge.

This may be a silly way of speaking; or it may be an un-
kind way of speaking, because of the agony it gives to meta-
physicians; but it is a way in which ordinary people do speak,
and ordinary people who speak in that way know quite well
what kind of things they are referring to. The metaphysi-
cians are right in thinking that difficult problems arise from
talking in that way; and I shall spend the greater part of
Book II in discussing these problems. Meanwhile, I shall
go on ‘speaking with the vulgar’; if metaphysicians do not
like it they need not read it.

The same distinction applies to such things as music. If a
man has made up a tune but has not written it down or sung
it or played it or done anything which could make it public

1 32 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

property, we say that the tune exists only in his mind, or
only in his head, or is an imaginary tune. If he sings or plays
it, thus making a series of audible noises, we call this series
of noises a real tune as distinct from an imaginary one.

When we speak of making an artifact we mean making
a real artifact. If an engineer said that he had made a bridge,
and when questioned turned out to mean that he had only
made it in his head, we should think him a liar or a fool. We
should say that he had not made a bridge at all, but only
a plan for one. If he said he had made a plan for a bridge
and it turned out that he had put nothing on paper, we should
not necessarily think he had deceived us. A plan is a kind
of thing that can only exist in a person’s mind. As a rule, an
engineer making a plan in his mind is at the same time mak-
ing notes and sketches on paper; but the plan does not
consist of what we call the ‘plans’, that is, the pieces of paper
with these notes and sketches on them. Even if he has put
complete specifications and working drawings on paper, the
paper with these specifications and drawings on it is not
the plan ; it only serves to tell people (including himself, for
memory is fallible) what the plan is. If the specifications
and drawings are published, for example in a treatise on civil
engineering, any one who reads the treatise intelligently will
get the plan of that bridge into his head. The plan is there-
fore public property, although by calling it public we mean
only that it can get into the heads of many people; as
many as read intelligently the book in which the specifica-
tions and drawings are published.

In the case of the bridge there is a further stage. The
plan may be ‘executed’ or carried out ; that is to say, the bridge
may be built. When that is done, the plan is said to be
‘embodied’ in the built bridge. It has begun to exist in a
new way, not merely in people’s heads but in stone or con-
crete. From being a mere plan existing in people’s heads,
it has become the form imposed on certain matter. Looking
back from that point of view, we can now say that the
engineer’s plan was the form of the bridge without its matter,

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 133

or that when we describe him as having the plan in his mind
we might equally have described him as having in mind the
form of the finished bridge without its matter.

The making of the bridge is the imposing of this form on
this matter. When we speak of the engineer as making the
plan, we are using the word ‘make’ in its other sense, as
equivalent to create. Making a plan for a bridge is not
imposing a certain form on a certain matter; it is a making
that is not a transforming, that is to say, it is a creation. It
has the other characteristics, too, that distinguish creating
from fabricating. It need not be done as means to an end,
for a man can make plans (for example, to illustrate a
text-book of engineering) with no intention of executing
them. In such a case the making of the plan is not means to
composing the text-book, it is part of composing the text-
book. It is not means to anything. Again, a person making
a plan need not be carrying out a plan to make that plan.
He may be doing this; he may for instance have planned a
text-book for which he needs an example of a reinforced
concrete bridge with a single span of 150 feet, to carry a
two-track railway with a roadway above it, and he may work
out a plan for such a bridge in order that it may occupy that
place in the book. But this is not a necessary condition of
planning. People sometimes speak as if everybody had, or
ought to have, a plan for his whole life, to which every other
plan he makes is or ought to be subordinated; but no one
can do that.

Making an artifact, or acting according to craft, thus
consists of two stages. (1) Making the plan, which is creat-
ing. (2) Imposing that plan on certain matter, which is
fabricating. Let us now consider a case of creating where
what is created is not a work of art. A person creating a
disturbance need not be, though of course he may be, acting
on a plan. He need not be, though of course he may be,
creating it as means to some ulterior end, such as causing
a government to resign. He cannot be transforming a
pre-existing material, for there is nothing out of which a

i 3 4 ART PROPER: ( 2 ) AS IMAGINATION

disturbance can be made; though he is able to create it
only because he already stands, as a finite being always
does stand, in a determinate situation; for example, at a
political meeting. But what he creates cannot be some-
thing that exists only in his own mind. A disturbance is
something in the minds of the people disturbed.

Next, let us take the case of a work of art. When a man
makes up a tune, he may and very often does at the same time
hum it or sing it or play it on an instrument. He may do
none of these things, but write it on- paper. Or he may both
hum it or the like, and also write it on paper at the same time
or afterwards. Also he may do these things in public, so that
the tune at its very birth becomes public property, like the
disturbance we have just considered. But all these are
accessories of the real work, though some of them are very
likely useful accessories. The actual making of the tune is
something that goes on in his head, and nowhere else.

I have already said that a thing which ‘exists in a person’s
head’ and nowhere else is alternatively called an imaginary
thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore alternatively
called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case of
creation, just as much as the making of a plan or a distur-
bance, and for the same reasons, which it would be tedious
to repeat. Hence the making of a tune is an instance of
imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a
poem, or a picture, or any other work of art.

The engineer, as we saw, when he made his plan in his
own head, may proceed to do something else which we call
‘making his plans’. His ‘plans’, here, are drawings and
specifications on paper, and these are artifacts made to serve
a certain purpose, namely to inform others or remind himself
of the plan. The making of them is accordingly not imagina-
tive creation ; indeed, it is not creation at all. It is fabrication,
and the ability to do it is a specialized form of skill, the craft
of engineer’s draughtsmanship.

The artist, when he has made his tune, may go on to do
something else which at first sight seems to resemble this:

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 135

he may do what is called publishing it. He may sing or play
it aloud, or write it down, and thus make it possible for others
to get into their heads the same thing which he has in his.
But what is written or printed on music-paper is not the tune.
It is only something which when studied intelligently will
enable others (or himself, when he has forgotten it) to
construct the tune for themselves in their own heads.

The relation between making the tune in his head and
putting it down on paper is thus quite different from the
relation, in the case of the engineer, between making a plan
for a bridge and executing that plan. The engineer’s plan is
embodied in the bridge : it is essentially a form that can be
imposed on certain matter, and when the bridge is built the
form is there, in the bridge, as the way in which the matter
composing it is arranged. But the musician’s tune is not
there on the paper at all. What is on the paper is not music,
it is only musical notation. The relation of the tune to the
notation is not like the relation of the plan to the bridge; it is
like the relation of the plan to the specifications and drawings;
for these, too, do not embody the plan as the bridge embodies
it, they are only a notation from which the abstract or as yet
unembodied plan can be reconstructed in the mind of a
person who studies them.

§ 4. Imagination and Make-believe

Imagination, like art itself, is a word with proper and
improper meanings. For our present purpose it will be
enough to distinguish imagination proper from one thing
that is often improperly so called : a thing already referred to
under the name of make-believe.

Make-believe involves a distinction between that which
is called by this name and that which is called real ; and this
distinction is of such a kind that the two exclude one another.
A make-believe situation can never be a real situation, and
vice versa. If, being hungry, I ‘imagine’ myself to be eating,
this ‘bare imagination of a feast’ is a make-believe situation
which I may be said to create for myself imaginatively; but

136 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

this imaginative creation has nothing to do with art proper,
though it has much to do with certain kinds of art falsely so
called. It is the motive of all those sham works of art which
provide their audiences or addicts with fantasies depicting
a state of things in which their desires are satisfied. Dream-
ing consists to a great extent (some psychologists say alto-
gether) of make-believe in which the dreamer’s desires are
thus satisfied; day-dreaming even more obviously so; and
the sham works of art of which I am speaking are perhaps
best understood as an organized and commercialized
development of day-dreaming. A story is told of a psycho-
logist who issued a questionnaire to all the girl students in
a college, asking them how they spent their time, and learnt
from their replies that I forget what vast percentage of it was
spent in day-dreaming. He is said to have come to the
conclusion that great results could be achieved if all this
day-dreaming could be co-ordinated. Quite right; but he
overlooked the fact that the thing had already been done,
and that Hollywood was there to prove it.

Imagination is indifferent to the distinction between the
real and the unreal . 1 When I look out of the window, I see
grass to right and left of the mullion that stands immediately
before me; but I also imagine the grass going on where this
mullion hides it from my sight. It may happen that I also
imagine a lawn-mower standing on that part of the lawn.
Now, the hidden part of the lawn is really there, the lawn-
mower is not; but I can detect nothing, either in the way in
which I imagine the two things, or in the ways in which they
respectively appear to my imagination, which at all corre-
sponds to this distinction. The act of imagining is of course
an act really performed; but the imagined object or situa-
tion or event is something which need not be real and need
not be unreal, and the person imagining it neither imagines

1 Further development of this point below, in Chapter XIII, § 1, will
involve a certain modification of the statement that what is imagined is as
such neither real nor unreal. The reader understands, I hope, that everything
I say in Book I is avowedly provisional, and that my theory of art is not
stated until Book III.

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 137

it as real or unreal, nor, when he conies to reflect on his act of
imagining, thinks of it as real or unreal. Make-believe, too,
is a thing which can be done without reflecting on it. When
it is so done, the person who does it is unaware that he is
constructing for himself unreal objects or situations or
events; but when he reflects, he either discovers that these
things are unreal, or else falls into the error of taking them
for realities.

There is probably always a motive behind any act of make-
believe, namely, the desire for something which we should
enjoy or possess if the make-believe were truth. It implies
a felt dissatisfaction with the situation in which one actually
stands, and an attempt to compensate for this dissatisfaction
not by practical means, by bringing a more satisfactory state
of things into existence, but by imagining a more satis-
factory state of things and getting what satisfaction one can
out of that. For imagination proper there is no such motive.
It is not because I am dissatisfied with the match-box lying
before me on the table that I imagine its inside, whether as
full or as empty; it is not because I am dissatisfied with an
interrupted grass-plot that I imagine it as continuing where
the mullion hides it from my view. Imagination is indifferent,
not only to the distinction between real and unreal, but also
to the distinction between desire and aversion.

Make-believe presupposes imagination, and may be de-
scribed as imagination operating in a peculiar way under
the influence of peculiar forces. Out of the numerous things
which one imagines, some are chosen, whether consciously
or unconsciously, to be imagined with peculiar completeness
or vividness or tenacity, and others are repressed, because
the first are things whose reality one desires, and the second
things from whose reality one has an aversion. The result is
make-believe, which is thus imagination acting under the
censorship of desire; where desire means not the desire
to imagine, nor even the desire to realize an imagined
situation, but the desire that the situation imagined were
real.

138 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

A good deal of damage has been done to aesthetic theory
by confusing these two things. The connexion between art
and imagination has been a commonplace for at least two
hundred years ; 1 but the confusion between art and amuse-
ment has been both reflected and reinforced by a confusion
between imagination and make-believe, which culminates in
the attempt of the psycho-analysts to subsume artistic
creation under their theory (certainly a true theory) of
‘fantasies’ as make-believe gratifications of desire. This
attempt is admirably successful so Jong as it deals with the
art, falsely so called, of the ordinary popular novel or film;
but it could not conceivably be applied to art proper. When
the attempt is made to base an aesthetic upon it (a thing
which has happened lamentably often) the result is not an
aesthetic but an anti-aesthetic. This may be because the
psychologists who have tried to explain artistic creation by
appeal to the notion of ‘fantasy’ have no idea that there is
any such distinction as that between amusement art and art
proper, but are merely perpetuating in their own jargon a
vulgar misconception, common in the nineteenth century,
according to which the artist is a kind of dreamer or day-
dreamer, constructing in fancy a make-believe world which
if it existed would be, at least in his own opinion, a better or
more pleasant one than that in which we live. Competent
artists and competent aestheticians have again and again
protested against this misconception; but the protest has
naturally had no effect on the many people whose experience
of so-called art, being limited to the ‘art’ of organized and
commercialized day-dreaming, it faithfully describes. And
to this class it would seem that our psycho-analyst aesthe-
ticians belong. Or perhaps it is their patients that belong
to it. An excessive indulgence in day-dreaming would cer-
tainly tend to produce moral diseases like those from which
their patients suffer.

1 The habit of calling aesthetic experience ‘the pleasures of the imagi-
nation’ dates back, I think, to Addison; the philosophical theory of art as
imagination, to his contemporary Vico.

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

139

§ 5. The Work of Art as Imaginary Object

If the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative
creation, a tune is an imaginary thing. And the same applies
to a poem or a painting or any other work of art. This seems
paradoxical ; we are apt to think that a tune is not an imaginary
thing but a real thing, a real collection of noises; that a
painting is a real piece of canvas covered with real colours ;
and so on. I hope to show, if the reader will have patience,
that there is no paradox Jiere ; that both these propositions
express what we do as a matter of fact say about works of art;
and that they do not contradict one another, because they are
concerned with different things.

When, speaking of a work of art (tune, picture, &c.), we
mean by art a specific craft, intended as a stimulus for produc-
ing specific emotional effects in an audience, we certainly mean
to designate by the term ‘work of art’ something that we should
call real. The artist as magician or purveyor of amusement is
necessarily a craftsman making real things, and making them
out of some material according to some plan. His works are
as real as the works of an engineer, and for the same reason.

But it does not at all follow that the same is true of an
artist proper. His business is not to produce an emotional
effect in an audience, but, for example, to make a tune.
This tune is already complete and perfect when it exists
merely as a tune in his head, that is, an imaginary tune.
Next, he may arrange for the tune to be played before an
audience. Now there comes into existence a real tune, a
collection of noises. But which of these two things is the
work of art? Which of them is the music? The answer is
implied in what we have already said: the music, the work of
art, is not the collection of noises, it is the tune in the com-
poser’s head. The noises made by the performers, and heard
by the audience, are not the music at all ; they are only means
by which the audience, if they listen intelligently (not other-
wise), can reconstruct for themselves the imaginary tune that
existed in the composer’s head.

140 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

This is not a paradox. It is not something Trapa 26£av,
contrary to what we ordinarily believe and express in our
ordinary speech. We all know perfectly well, and remind
each other often enough, that a person who hears the noises
the instruments make is not thereby possessing himself of
the music. Perhaps no one can do that unless he does
hear the noises ; but there is something else which he must
do as well. Our ordinary word for this other thing is listen-
ing; and the listening which we have to do when we hear the
noises made by musicians is in a way rather like the thinking
we have to do when we hear the noises made, for example, by
a person lecturing on a scientific subject. We hear the sound
of his voice; but what he is doing is not simply to make
noises, but to develop a scientific thesis. The noises are
meant to assist us in achieving what he assumes to be our
purpose in coming to hear him lecture, that is, thinking this
same scientific thesis for ourselves. The lecture, therefore,
is not a collection of noises made by the lecturer with his organs
of speech; it is a collection of scientific thoughts related to
those noises in such a way that a person who. not only hears
but thinks as well becomes able to think these thoughts for
himself. We may call this the communication of thought by
means of speech, if we like; but if we do, we must think of
communication not as an ‘imparting’ of thought by the
speaker to the hearer, the speaker somehow planting his
thought in the hearer’s receptive mind, but as a ‘reproduction’
of the speaker’s thought by the hearer, in virtue of his own
active thinking.

The parallel with listening to music is not complete. The
two cases are similar at one point, dissimilar at another.
They are dissimilar in that a concert and a scientific lecture
are different things, and what we are trying to ‘get out of’
the concert is a thing of a different kind from the scientific
thoughts we are trying to ‘get out of’ the lecture. But they
are similar in this: that just as what we get out of the lecture
is something other than the noises we hear proceeding from
the lecturer’s mouth, so what we get out of the concert is

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ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 141

something other than the noises made by the performers.
In each case, what we get out of it is something which we
have to reconstruct in our own minds, and by our own efforts ;
something which remains for ever inaccessible to a person
who cannot or will not make efforts of the right kind, how-
ever completely he hears the sounds that fill the room in
which he is sitting.

This, I repeat, is something we all know perfectly well.
And because we all know it, we need not trouble to examine
or criticize the ideas of aestheticians (if there are any left
to-day — they were common enough at one time) who say
that what we get out of listening to music, or looking at
paintings, or the like, is some peculiar kind of sensual
pleasure. When we do these things, we certainly may, in so
far as we are using our senses, enjoy sensual pleasures. It
would be odd if we did not. A colour, or a shape, or an
instrumental timbre may give us an exquisite pleasure of a
purely sensual kind. It may even be true (though this is not so
certain) that no one would become a lover of music unless he
were more susceptible than other people to the sensual pleasure
of sound. But even if a special susceptibility to this pleasure
may at first lead some people towards music, they must,
in proportion as they are more susceptible, take the more
pains to prevent that susceptibility from interfering with
their power of listening. For any concentration on the
pleasantness of the noises themselves concentrates the mind
on hearing, and makes it hard or impossible to listen. There
is a kind of person who goes to concerts mainly for the
sensual pleasure he gets from the sheer sounds ; his presence
may be good for the box-office, but it is as bad for music as the
presence of a person who went to a scientific lecture for the
sensual pleasure he got out of the tones of the lecturer’s voice
would be for science. And this, again, everybody knows.

It is unnecessary to go through the form of applying what
has been said about music to the other arts. We must try
instead to make in a positive shape the point that has been
put negatively. Music does not consist of heard noises,

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142 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

paintings do not consist of seen colours, and so forth. Of
what, then, do these things consist ? Not, clearly, of a ‘form’,
understood as a pattern or a system of relations between the
various noises we hear or the various colours we see. Such
‘forms’ are nothing but the perceived structures of bodily
‘works of art’, that is to say, ‘works of art’ falsely so called;
and these formalistic theories of art, popular though they
have been and are, have no relevance to art proper and will
not be further considered in this book. The distinction
between form and matter, on which they are based, is a dis-
tinction belonging to the philosophy of craft, and not
applicable to the philosophy of art.

The work of art proper is something not seen or heard,
but something imagined. But what is it that we imagine?
We have suggested that in music the work of art proper is an
imagined tune. Let us begin by developing this idea.

Everybody must have noticed a certain discrepancy be-
tween what we actually see when looking at a picture or
statue or play and what we see imaginatively; what we
actually see when listening to music or speech and what we
imaginatively hear. To take an obvious example : in watching
a puppet-play we could (as we say) swear that we have seen
the expression on the puppets’ faces change with their chang-
ing gestures and the puppet-man’s changing words and tones
of voice. Knowing that they are only puppets, we know that
their facial expression cannot change; but that makes no differ-
ence; we continue to see imaginatively the expressions which
we know that we do not see actually. The same thing happens
in the case of masked actors like those of the Greek stage.

In listening to the pianoforte, again, we know from
evidence of the same kind that we must be hearing every
note begin with a sforzando, and fade away for the whole
length of time that it continues to sound. But our imagination
enables us to read into this experience something quite
different. As we seem to see the puppets’ features move, so
we seem to hear a pianist producing a sostenuto tone, almost
like that of a horn; and in fact notes of the horn and the

I

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 143

pianoforte are easily mistaken one for the other. Still
stranger, when we hear a violin and pianoforte playing
together in the key, say, of G, the violin’s F sharp is actually
played a great deal sharper than the pianoforte’s. Such a
discrepancy would sound intolerably out of tune except to a
person whose imagination was trained to focus itself on the
key of G, and silently corrected every note of the equally
tempered pianoforte to suit it. The corrections which
imagination must thus carry out, in order that we should be
able to listen to an entire orchestra, beggar description.
When we listen to a speaker or singer, imagination is con-
stantly supplying articulate sounds which actually our ears
do not catch. In looking at a drawing in pen or pencil, we
take a series of roughly parallel lines for the tint of a shadow.
And so on.

Conversely, in all these cases imagination works negatively.
We disimagine, if I may use the word, a great deal which
actually we see and hear. The street noises at a concert, the
noises made by our breathing and shuffling neighbours, and
even some of the noises made by the performers, are thus
shut out of the picture unless by their loudness or in some
other way they are too obtrusive to be ignored. At the
theatre, we are strangely able to ignore the silhouettes of the
people sitting in front of us, and a good many things that
happen on the stage. Looking at a picture, we do not notice
the shadows that fall on it or, unless it is excessive, the light
reflected from its varnish.

All this is commonplace. And the conclusion has already
been stated by Shakespeare’s Theseus : ‘the best in this kind
[‘works of art’, as things actually perceived by the senses]
are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination
amend them.’ The music to which we listen is not the heard
sound, but that sound as amended in various ways by the
listener’s imagination, and so with the other arts.

But this does not go nearly far enough. Reflection will
show that the imagination with which we listen to music is
something more, and more complex, than any inward ear;

144 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

the imagination with which we look at paintings is some-
thing more than ‘the mind’s eye’. Let us consider this in the
case of painting.

§ 6. The Total Imaginative Experience

The change which came over painting at the close of the
nineteenth century was nothing short of revolutionary.
Every one in the course of that century had supposed that
painting was ‘a visual art’; that the painter was primarily
a person who used his eyes, and used his hands only to record
what the use of his eyes had revealed to him. Then came
Cezanne, and began to paint like a blind man. His still-life
studies, which enshrine the essence of his genius, are like
groups of things that have been groped over with the hands;
he uses colour not to reproduce what he sees in looking at
them but to express almost in a kind of algebraic notation
what in this groping he has felt. So with his interiors; the
spectator finds himself bumping about those rooms, circum-
navigating with caution those menacingly angular tables,
coming up to the persons that so massively occupy those
chairs and fending himself off them with his hands. It is the
same when Cezanne takes us into the open air. His land-
scapes have lost almost every trace of visuality. Trees never
looked like that; that is how they feel to a man who en-
counters them with his eyes shut, blundering against them
blindly. A bridge is no longer a pattern of colour, as it is for
Cotman; or a patch of colour so distorted as to arouse in the
spectator the combined emotions of antiquarianism and
vertigo, as it is for Mr. Frank Brangwyn; it is a perplexing
mixture of projections and recessions, over and round which
we find ourselves feeling our way as one can imagine an
infant feeling its way, when it has barely begun to crawl,
among the nursery furniture. And over the landscape broods
the obsession of Mont Saint-Victoire, never looked at, but
always felt, as a child feels the table over the back of its head.

Of course Cezanne was right. Painting can never be a
visual art. A man paints with his hands, not with his eyes.

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 145

The Impressionist doctrine that what one paints is light 1
was a pedantry which failed to destroy the painters it en-
slaved only because they remained painters in defiance of
the doctrine: men of their hands, men who did their work
with fingers and wrist and arm, and even (as they walked
about the studio) with their legs and toes. What one paints
is what can be painted ; no one can do more ; and what can be
painted must stand in some relation to the muscular activity
of painting it. Cezanne’s practice reminds one of Kant’s
theory that the painter’s ,only use for his colours is to make
shapes visible. But it is really quite different. Kant thought
of the painter’s shapes as two-dimensional shapes visibly
traced on the canvass; Cezanne’s shapes are never two-
dimensional, and they are never traced on the canvass ; they
are solids, and we get at them through the canvass. In this
new kind of painting the ‘plane of the picture’ disappears;
it melts into nothing, and we go through it . 2

Vernon Blake, who understood all this very well from the
angle of the practising artist, and could explain himself in
words like the Irishman he was, told draughtsmen that the
plane of the picture was a mere superstition. Hold your
pencil vertical to the paper, said he; don’t stroke the paper,
dig into it; think of it as if it were the surface of a slab of clay
in which you were going to cut a relief, and of your pencil as
a knife. Then you will find that you can draw something
which is not a mere pattern on paper, but a solid thing lying
inside or behind the paper.

1 Anticipated by Uvedale Price as long ago as 1 801 : ‘I can imagine a man
of the future, who may be born without the sense of feeling, being able to
see nothing but light variously modified’ (Dialogue on the distinct characters
of the Picturesque and Beautiful).

2 The ‘disappearance’ of the picture-plane is the reason why, in modem
artists who have learnt to accept Cezanne’s principles and to carry their
consequences a stage further than he carried them himself, perspective (to the
great scandal of the man in the street, who clings to the picture-plane as
unconsciously and as convulsively as a drowning man to a spar) has dis-
appeared too. The man in the street thinks that this has happened because
these modem fellows can’t draw; which is like thinking that young men of the
Royal Air Force career about in the sky because they can’t walk. See p. 153.

1 4 6 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

In Mr. Berenson’s hands the revolution became retro-
spective. He found that the great Italian painters yielded
altogether new results when approached in this manner. He
taught his pupils (and every one who takes any interest in
Renaissance painting nowadays is Mr. Berenson’s pupil) to
look in paintings for what he called ‘tactile values’; to think
of their muscles as they stood before a picture, and notice
what happened in their fingers and elbows. He showed that
Masaccio and Raphael, to take only two outstanding in-
stances, were painting as Cezanne painted, not at all as Monet
or Sisley painted; not squirting light on a canvass, but
exploring with arms and legs a world of solid things where
Masaccio stalks giant-like on the ground and Raphael floats
through serene air.

In order to understand the theoretical significance of these
facts, we must look back at the ordinary theory of painting
current in the nineteenth century. This was based on the
conception of a ‘work of art’, with its implication that the
artist is a kind of craftsman producing things of this or that
kind, each with the characteristics proper to its kind,
according to the difference between one kind of craft and
another. The musician makes sounds; the sculptor makes
solid shapes in stone or metal ; the painter makes patterns of
paint on canvass. What there is in these works depends,
of course, on what kind of works they are; and what the
spectator finds in them depends on what there is in them.
The spectator in looking at a picture is simply seeing flat
patterns of colour, and he can get nothing out of the picture
except what can be contained in such patterns.

The forgotten truth about painting which was redis-
covered by what may be called the Cezanne-Berenson ap-
proach to it was that the spectator’s experience on looking
at a picture is not a specifically visual experience at all. What
he experiences does not consist of what he sees. It does not
even consist of this as modified, supplemented, and ex-
purgated by the work of the visual imagination. It does not
belong to sight alone, it belongs also (and on some occasions

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 147

even more essentially) to touch. We must be a little more
accurate, however. When Mr. Berenson speaks of tactile
values, he is not thinking of things like the texture of fur and
cloth, the cool roughness of bark, the smoothness or grittiness
of a stone, and other qualities which things exhibit to our
sensitive finger-tips. As his own statements abundantly
show, he is thinking, or thinking in the main, of distance and
space and mass: not of touch sensations, but of motor
sensations such as we experience by using our muscles and
moving our limbs. But these are not actual motor sensations,
they are imaginary motor sensations. In order to enjoy
them when looking at a Masaccio we need not walk straight
through the picture, or even stride about the gallery; what
we are doing is to imagine ourselves as moving in these ways.
In short: what we get from looking at a picture is not merely
the experience of seeing, or even partly seeing and partly
imagining, certain visible objects; it is also, and in Mr.
Berenson’s opinion more importantly, the imaginary ex-
perience of certain complicated muscular movements.

Persons especially interested in painting may have thought
all this, when Mr. Berenson began saying it, something
strange and new; but in the case of other arts the parallels
were very familiar. It was well known that in listening to
music we not only hear the noises of which the ‘music’, that
is to say the sequences and combinations of audible sounds,
actually consists; we also enjoy imaginary experiences which
do not belong to the region of sound at all, notably visual
and motor experiences. Everybody knew, too, that poetry
has the power of bringing before us not only the sounds
which constitute the audible fabric of the ‘poem’, but other
sounds, and sights, and tactile and motor experiences, and
at times even scents, all of which we possess, when we listen
to poetry, in imagination.

This suggests that what we get out of a work of art is al-
ways divisible into two parts. (1) There is a specialized sen-
suous experience, an experience of seeing or hearing as the
case may be. (2) There is also a non-specialized imaginative

148 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

experience, involving not only elements homogeneous, after
their imaginary fashion, with those which make up the
specialized sensuous experience, but others heterogeneous
with them. So remote is this imaginative experience from
the specialism of its sensuous basis, that we may go so far
.as to call it an imaginative experience of total activity.

At this point the premature theorist lifts up his voice
again. ‘See’, he exclaims, ‘how completely we have turned
the tables on the old-fashioned theory that what we get out
of art is nothing but the sensual pleasure of sight or hearing!
The enjoyment of art is no merely sensuous experience, it is
an imaginative experience. A person who listens to music,
instead of merely hearing it, is not only experiencing noises,
pleasant though these may be. He is imaginatively ex-
periencing all manner of visions and motions ; the sea, the
sky, the stars; the falling of the rain-drops, the rushing of
the wind, the storm, the flow of the brook ; 1 the dance, the
embrace, and the battle. A person who looks at pictures,
instead of merely seeing patterns of colour, is moving in
imagination among buildings and landscapes and human
forms. What follows ? Plainly this : the value of any given
work of art to a person properly qualified to appreciate its
value is not the delightfulness of the sensuous elements in
which as a work of art it actually consists, but the delight-
fulness of the imaginative experience which those sensuous
elements awake in him. Works of art are only means to an
end; the end is this total imaginative experience which they
enable us to enjoy.’

This attempt to rehabilitate the technical theory depends
on distinguishing what we find in the work of art, its actual
sensuous qualities, as put there by the artist, from something
else which we do not strictly find in it, but rather import
into it from our own stores of experience and powers of
imagination. The first is conceived as objective, really be-
longing to the work of art: the second as subjective, belong-
ing not to it but to activities which go on in us when we

1 EmestNewman, ‘Programme Music’, in Musical Studies (190$),$. 109.

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 149

contemplate it. The peculiar value of this contemplation,
then, is conceived as lying not in the first thing but in the
second. Any one having the use of his senses could see all
the colours and shapes that a picture contains, and hear all the
sounds which together make up a symphony; but he would
not on that account be enjoying an aesthetic experience. To
do that he must use his imagination, and so proceed from the
first part of the experience, which is given in sensation, to
the second part, which is imaginatively constructed.

This seems to be the position of the ‘realistic’ philosophers
who maintain that what they call ‘beauty’ is ‘subjective’.
The peculiar value which belongs to an experience such as
that of listening to music or looking at pictures arises, they
think, not from our getting out of these things what is really
in them, or ‘apprehending their objective nature’, but from
our being stimulated by contact with them to certain free
activities of our own. It is in these activities that the value
really resides; and although (to use Professor Alexander’s
word) we may ‘impute’ it to the music or the picture, it
actually belongs not to them but to us. 1

But we cannot rest in this position. The distinction
between what we find and what we bring is altogether too
naive. Let us look at it from the point of view of the artist.
He presents us with a picture. According to the doctrine
just expounded, he has actually put into this picture certain
colours which, by merely opening our eyes and looking at it,
we shall find there. Is this all he did in painting the picture ?
Certainly not. When he painted it, he was in possession of
an experience quite other than that of seeing the colours he
was putting on the canvass ; an imaginary experience of total
activity more or less like that which we construct for our-
selves when we look at the picture. If he knew how to paint,
and if we know how to look at a painting, the resemblance
between this imaginary experience of his and the imaginary

1 So Alexander, Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933), pp. 25-6;
Carritt, What is Beauty? (1932), cL iv. I am not forgetting that Professor
Alexander has a chapter (op. cit. 9 ch. x) on ‘The objectivity of Beauty*.

ISO ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

experience which we get from looking at his work is at least
as close as that between the colours he saw in the picture and
those we see; perhaps closer. But if he paints his picture in
such a way that we, when we look at it using our imagination,
find ourselves enjoying an imaginary experience of total
activity like that which he enjoyed when painting it, there is
not much sense in saying that we bring this experience with
us to the picture and do not find it there. The artist, if we
told him that, would laugh at us and assure us that what we
believed ourselves to have read into -the picture was just what
he put there.

No doubt there is a sense in which we bring it with us.
Our finding of it is not something that merely happens to us,
it is something we do, and do because we are the right kind
of people to do it. The imaginary experience which we get
from the picture is not merely the kind of experience the
picture is capable of arousing, it is the kind of experience
we are capable of having. But this applies equally to the
colours. He has not put into the pictures certain colours
which we passively find there. He has painted, and seen
certain colours come into existence as he paints. If we,
looking at his picture afterwards, see the same colours, that
is because our own powers of colour-vision are like his.
Apart from the activity of our senses we should see no colours
at all.

Thus the two parts of the experience are not contrasted
in the way in which we fancied them to be. There is no
justification for saying that the sensuous part of it is some-
thing we find and the imaginary part something we bring,
or that the sensuous part is objectively ‘there’ in the ‘work
of art’, the imaginary part subjective, a mode of conscious-
ness as distinct from a quality of a thing. Certainly we find
the colours there in the painting; but we find them only
because we are actively using our eyes, and have eyes of such
a kind as to see what the painter wanted us to see, which a
colour-blind person could not have done. We bring our
powers of vision with us, and find what they reveal. Similarly,

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 151

we bring our imaginative powers with us, and find what they
reveal: namely, an imaginary experience of total activity
which we find in the picture because the painter had put
it there.

In the light of this discussion let us recapitulate and
summarize our attempt to answer the question, what is a
work of art ? What, for example, is a piece of music ?

(x) In the pseudo-aesthetic sense for which art is a kind
of craft, a piece of music is a series of audible noises. The
psychological and ‘realistic’ aestheticians, as we can now see,
have not got beyond this pseudo-aesthetic conception.

(2) If ‘work of art’ means work of art proper, a piece of
music is not something audible, but something which may
exist solely in the musician’s head (§ 3).

(3) To some extent it must exist solely in the musician’s
head (including, of course, the audience as well as the
composer under that name), for his imagination is always
supplementing, correcting, and expurgating what he actually
hears (§ 4).

(4) The music which he actually enjoys as a work of art
is thus never sensuously or ‘actually’ heard at all. It is some-
thing imagined.

(5) But it is not imagined sound (in the case of painting,
it is not imagined colour-patterns, &c.). It is an imagined
experience of total activity (§ 5).

(6) Thus a work of art proper is a total activity which the
person enjoying it apprehends, or is conscious of, by the use
of his imagination.

§ 7. Transition to Book II

Putting together the conclusions of this chapter and the
last, we get the following result.

By creating for ourselves an imaginary experience or
activity, we express our emotions ; and this is what we call art.

What this formula means, we do not yet know. We can
annotate it word by word; but only to forestall misunder- ;
standings, thus. ‘Creating’ refers to a productive activity ;

i S 2 ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION

which is not technical in character. ‘For ourselves’ does not
exclude ‘for others’ ; on the contrary, it seems to include that;
at any rate in principle. ‘Imaginary’ does not mean anything
in the least like ‘make-believe’, nor does it imply that what
goes by that name is private to the person who imagines.
The ‘experience or activity’ seems not to be sensuous, and
not to be in any way specialized : it is some kind of general
activity in which the whole self is involved. ‘Expressing’
emotions is certainly not the same thing as arousing them.
There is emotion there before we express it. But as we express
it, we confer upon it a different kind of emotional colouring;
in one way, therefore, expression creates what it expresses,
for exactly this emotion, colouring and all, only exists so far
as it is expressed. Finally, we cannot say what ‘emotion’ is,
except that we mean by it the kind of thing which, on the
kind of occasion we are talking about, is expressed.

This is as far as we can get by the met -.od we have been
hitherto using. We have tried, so far, merely to repeat what
every one knows; every one, that is, who is accustomed to
dealing with art and distinguishing art proper from art
falsely so called. We must now begin working on a different
line. There are three problems before us : three unknowns
in the formula stated above. We do not know what imagina-
tion is. We do not know what emotion is. And we do not
know what is the nature of the connexion between them,
described by saying that imagination expresses emotion.

These problems must be dealt with (and this is what I
mean by saying we must work on a different line), not by
continuing to concentrate our attention on the special
characteristics of aesthetic experience, but by broadening
our view, so far as we can, until it covers the general charac-
teristics of experience as a whole. It was explained in the
introductory chapter that this is the only way in which we
can hope to go beyond the preliminary business of establish-
ing a satisfactory usage of the term art, and approach the
problem of defining it.

In Book II, therefore, I shall make a fresh start. I shall

ART PROPER: (2) AS IMAGINATION 153

try to work out a theory of imagination and of its place in
the structure of experience as a whole, by developing what
has already been said about it by well-known philosophers.
In doing this I shall make no use whatever of anything
contained in Book I. I shall be, as it were, tunnelling from
a quite different direction towards the same point which the
superficial scratchings of Book I have laid more or less bare.
When these two lines of inquiry are complete, they should
coincide; and their union should produce a theory of art,
to be stated in Book III„

Further note to p. 145, on perspective and the picture-plane . — The picture
as a bodily thing has of course a ‘plane’, as one discovers by handling it. But
in order to see it as a work of art one stands back and looks at it. When you do
that, the picture-plane is no longer present to you as something given in sensation
(though even if it were, you could ‘disimagine’ it; cf. p. 143); it is present to
you only as something you imagine by means of tactile (or rather motor)
imagination (p. 147). The only universal reasons for doing this are non-
aesthetic reasons, connected with your relation to the picture as a bodily
thing. When you look at it aesthetically, these reasons disappear. But there
may, under certain conditions, be genuinely aesthetic reasons for doing it,
namely the following.

The origin of perspective (which is the logical consequence of imagining
the picture-plane) was connected with the use of painting as an adjunct to
architecture. If the shape of an interior is meant to be looked at aesthetically,
and if one of its walls is covered with a painting also meant to be looked at
aesthetically, and if these two aesthetic experiences are meant to be fused into
one (not otherwise), then, since the wall-plane is an element in the architec-
tural design, the picture must be so painted that a spectator’s imagination is
drawn towards the wall-plane, not away from it. This is why Renaissance
painters, acting as interior decorators, revived and elaborated the system of
perspective already used by interior decorators at Pompeii and elsewhere in
the ancient world. For movable pictures, perspective is mere pedantry.

BOOK II

THE THEORY OF IMAGINATION

VIII

THINKING AND FEELING
§ i. The Two Contrasted

Of all the features which our experience presents when we
reflect upon it, none is more familiar than the contrast
between thinking and feeling. I will try to state some of the
characteristics of this contrast.

First, there is a special kind of simplicity about feeling,
in contrast with what may be called the bipolarity of thought.
Whenever we think we are more or less conscious of a
distinction between thinking well and thinking ill, doing the
job of thinking successfully or unsuccessfully. The distinc-
tions between right and wrong, good and bad, true and false,
are special cases of this bipolarity; it is plain that none of
them could arise except in the experience of a thinking being.
This is not merely because they are distinctions; nor even
merely because they are oppositions. Distinctions and even
oppositions can arise in feeling as such: for example the
distinction between red and blue, the opposition between
hot and cold or pleasant and painful. The distinction or
opposition in virtue of which I speak of thought as bipolar
is of a quite different kind from these. There is nothing in
the case of feeling to correspond with what, in the case, of
thinking, may be called mis-thinking or thinking wrong. The
most general name for this thing is failure. Failure and its
opposite, success, imply that the activity which fails or suc-
ceeds is not only a ‘doing something’ but a ‘trying to do some-
thing’, where the word ‘trying’ refers not to what is called
‘conation’, but to an activity which sets itself definite tasks, and
judges itself as having succeeded or failed by reference to
the standards or criteria which it thereby imposes on itself.

Secondly, there is a special kind of privacy about feelings,
in contrast with what may be called the publicity of thoughts.
A hundred people in the street may all feel cold, but each

4436 M '

1 58 THINKING AND FEELING

person’s feeling is private to himself. But if they all think
that the thermometer reads 21 ° Fahrenheit, they are all
thinking the same thought: this thought is public to them
all. The act of thinking it may or may not be an entirely
private act; but a thought in the sense of what we think is
not the act of thinking it, and a feeling in the sense of what
we feel is not the act of feeling it. In the last paragraph I
pointed to a distinction between the act of feeling and the
act of thought; in this I am pointing to a distinction between
what we feel and what we think. The cold that our hundred
people feel is not the physical fact that there are ten degrees
of frost; nor is it even something due to that fact, for if
one of them had lately been living in a colder climate he
would not feel cold in those physical conditions ; it is simply
a feeling in them, or rather a hundred different feelings, each
private to the person who feels it, but each in certain ways
like all the rest. But the ‘fact’ or ‘proposition’ or ‘thought’
that there are ten degrees of frost is not a hundred different
‘facts’ or ‘propositions’ or ‘thoughts’ ; it is one ‘fact’ or ‘pro-
position’ or ‘thought’ which a hundred different people
‘apprehend’ or ‘assent to’ or ‘think’. And what is here said
of the relation between different persons in respect of what
they feel and think respectively is equally true of the relation
between different occasions of feeling and thinking re-
spectively in the life of a single person.

Thirdly, when these two distinctions are taken together
the upshot of them can be stated by saying that thoughts can
corroborate or contradict each other, but feelings cannot.
If some one beside myself thinks that there are ten degrees
Of frost, we are said to agree in thinking this; and the fact of
agreement, though it does not prove me right, makes this more
probable. If I think there are ten degrees of frost and some
one else thinks not, we are contradicting each other, and one
of us must be wrong. But if I feel cold, nothing about this
feeling of mine follows from some one else’s feeling either
cold or warm. He is not agreeing or disagreeing with me.

It has sometimes been said that what we feel is always

THINKING AND FEELING 159

something existing here and now, and limited in its existence
to the place and time at which it is felt; whereas what we
think is always something eternal, something having no
special habitation of its own in space and time but existing
everywhere and always. In some sense this is perhaps true.
But for the present we should do well to regard it as an
overstatement, at least so far as the second part of it is
concerned. What we feel is certainly limited in its existence
to the here and now in which we feel it. The experience of
feeling is a perpetual flux in which nothing remains the same,
and what we take for permanence or recurrence is not a
sameness of feeling at different times but only a greater or
less degree of resemblance between different feelings. The
only motive any one can have for denying this, and con-
juring up the metaphysical fairy-tale of a limbo in which all
possible feelings are stored when nobody feels them, is the
panic caused by sophistical attempts to reduce the whole of
experience to feeling and consequently the whole world to
a phantasmagoria of feelings. The right answer to these
sophistries is not ‘then we must confer on feelings the attri-
butes proper to thoughts’, but, ‘there is more in experience
than mere feeling; there is thought as well’.

But in order to point the contrast between feeling and
thinking it is not necessary to assert the eternity of all objects
of thought as such. What is necessary is only to insist that in
thinking we are concerned with something that lasts, even if
it does not last for ever; something that genuinely recurs as a
factor in experience, even if it cannot recur to infinity. We
need not ask whether the fact that there were ten degrees of
frost here on a certain morning is an eternal truth, whatever
that may mean; all we are obliged to maintain is that it is
a truth knowable to more than one person and to the same
person on more than one occasion. If we compare the flux of
feeling to the flow of a river, thought has at least the relative
solidity and permanence of the soil and rocks that make its
channel.

It may be wise here to enter a warning. I have distinguished

160 THINKING AND FEELING

the activities of feeling and thinking from what is re-
spectively felt and thought. Words like thought, feeling,
knowledge, experience, have notoriously a double-barrelled
significance. They refer both to the activity of thinking and
to what we think; the activity of feeling and what we feel;
the activity of knowing and what we know; the activity of
experiencing and what we experience. When such words are
used, it is important not to confuse these two halves of their
meaning. My warning is this: it is important, also, to
remember that the relation between the two things referred
to is not the same in all these various cases. Thinking and
feeling are different not only in that what we feel is something
different in kind from what we think, nor also because the act
of thinking is a different kind of act from the act of feeling,
but because the relation between the act of thinking and
what we think is different in kind from the relation between
the act of feeling and what we feel.

§ 2. Feeling

If we now consider feeling by itself, we find that there are
two different kinds of experience each of which goes by that
name. First, we say that hot and cold, hard and soft, are
things that we feel; in Scotland they talk of ‘feeling’ a smell,
plainly in the same sense; and if we liked to extend that
usage we might claim a similar right to speak of ‘feeling’ a
sound or a colour. We do not actually use the English word
so widely; but we do so use words derived from its Latin
equivalent sentio ; we describe the specialized activities of
thus ‘feeling’ colours, sounds, scents, and the like collec-
tively as the senses, and the common activity which is
specialized into them as sensation. Secondly, we speak of
feeling pleasure or pain, anger, fear, and so forth. Here also
we have a general activity of feeling specialized into various
kinds, each with its proper specification of what we feel. It is
not, clearly, of quite the same kind as sensation; to distin-
guish it, let us call it emotion.

The distinction between these two kinds of feeling is not

THINKING AND FEELING 161

the distinction between two species of a common genus, like
that between seeing and hearing, or feeling anger and feeling
fear. Seeing and hearing are alternative specifications of their
common genus sensation, so that an act of seeing is one act
of sensation, and an act of hearing is another; if we happen
to see and hear at the same time (as we often do, though
not always) we are performing two acts of sensation at
once. There is a relation between sensation and emotion
which is more intimate than this. When an infant is terrified
at the sight of a scarlet curtain blazing in the sunlight, there
are not two distinct experiences in its mind, one a sensation
of red and the other an emotion of fear: there is only one
experience, a terrifying red. We can certainly analyse that
experience into two elements, one sensuous and the other
emotional; but this is not to divide it into two experiences,
each independent of the other, like seeing red and hearing
the note of a bell.

These two elements, sensuous and emotional, are not
merely combined in the experience: they are combined
according to a definite structural pattern. This pattern can
be described by saying that the sensation takes precedence
of the emotion. Precedence here does not mean priority in
time. Had that been the case, there would have been two
experiences instead of one. Nor is it quite the same as the
relation of cause to effect; for emotion is not a mere effect of
sensation, it is a distinct and autonomous element in the
experience. Nor is it the same as the logical relation of ground
to consequent. We do, however, apply to it the word
‘because’, and say that the child is frightened because it sees
the curtain, although seeing the curtain and being frightened
are not two separate experiences. Relations of this type,
however we choose to describe them, are familiar. I raise
my hand from the elbow by contracting the biceps. The
contraction of the biceps and the raising of the hand are not
two bodily acts, but one. This one act is analysable into
these two parts, and of these the muscular contraction takes
precedence of the change in the position of the hand (the

1 62 THINKING AND FEELING

hand rises ‘because’ the biceps contracts), although it is
anatomically impossible that the biceps should contract
before the hand rose. I shall refer to this precedence of
sensation over emotion by describing a given emotion as the
‘emotional charge’ on the corresponding sensation ; or, since
it is desirable to distinguish the act of feeling from what we
feel, and confine the term sensation to the act of feeling,
the corresponding sensum.

It would probably be true to say that every sensum has its
own emotional charge. This is difficult to verify in detail to
any great extent; partly because it is difficult to stage the
necessary tests, since we generally experience a very large
number of sensa at once and therefore cannot easily deter-
mine whether each of them really has a distinct emotional
charge; partly because we are accustomed, for the purposes
of everyday life, to attend far more carefully to our sensations
than to our emotions.

The habit of ‘sterilizing’ sensa by ignoring their emotional
charge is not equally prevalent among all sorts and condi-
tions of men. It seems to be especially characteristic of adult
and ‘educated’ people in what is called modern European
civilization; among them, it is more developed in men than
in women, and less in artists than in others. To study the
so-called colour-symbolism of the Middle Ages is to see
into a world where, even among adult and educated Euro-
peans, the sterilizing of colour-sensa has not taken place:
where any one who is conscious of seeing a colour is simul-
taneously conscious of feeling a corresponding emotion, as is
still the case among ourselves with children and artists. In
persons who are likely to read this book, the habit of steri-
lizing sensa has probably become so ingrained that a reader
who tries to go behind it will find it very hard to overcome
the resistance which hampers him at every move in his
inquiry. In so far as he succeeds in recognizing what really
happens in himself, I believe he will find that every sensum
presents itself to him bearing a peculiar emotional charge,
and that sensation and emotion, thus related, are twin

THINKING AND FEELING 163

elements in every experience of feeling. In children this is
clearer than in adults, because they have not yet been
educated into the conventions of the society into which they
have been born; in artists clearer than in other adults,
because in order to be artists they must train themselves in
that particular to resist these conventions. Those who are
neither children nor artists can best approach the question
by considering these two types of case, where they will soon,
I think, be convinced that sensa never come uncharged with
emotion ; and this may lead them to further experiment upon
themselves and so to the conclusion that the emotionless
sensum, the ‘sensum’ of current philosophy, is not the actual
sensum as it is experienced, but the product of a process of
sterilization.

Feeling appears to arise in us independently of all thinking,
in a part of our nature which exists and functions below the
level of thought and is unaffected by it. All that we have
said about it, and all that anybody can ever say about it, is
of course discovered (or mis-discovered) by the activity of
thought; but thought seems in this case simply to discover
what was there independently of it, almost as if we were
thinking about the anatomical structure and functioning of
our body, which would no doubt exist and go on whether
we thought or not. Whether this is really so is not a very
easy question to decide. For the present, we must be con-
tent with the provisional answer that it seems so: it seems
that our sensuous-emotional nature, as feeling creatures, is
independent of our thinking nature, as rational creatures,
and constitutes a level of experience below the level of
thought. In calling it lower, I do not mean that it is rela-
tively unimportant in the economy of human life, or that it
constitutes a part of our being which we are entitled to
despise or belittle. I mean that it has (if I am right in my
opinion about it) the character of a foundation upon
which the rational part of our nature is built; laid and con-
solidated, both in the history of living organisms at large
and in the history of each human individual, before the

1 64 THINKING AND FEELING

superstructure of thought was built upon it, and enabling
that superstructure to function well by being itself in a
healthy condition.

This level of experience, at which we merely feel, in the
double sense of that word, i.e. experience sensations together
with their peculiar emotional charges, I propose to call the
psychical level. In using that name I am alluding to the
traditional distinction between ‘psyche’ or ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’,
taken as corresponding with my own distinction between
feeling and thinking; and also to the word psychology, which
implies a claim that the science so designated has as its proper
field the study of something properly called psychic: and
I hold that the proper business of psychology is to investigate
this level of experience, and not the level which is character-
ized by thought (see p. 171). I hope I need not apologize
for using a word which in some readers’ minds may conjure
up associations with the Society for Psychical Research.

I shall in this book use the word ‘feeling’ only with
reference to the psychical level of experience, and not as a
synonym for emotion generally. This level contains indeed
a vast variety of emotions; but only those which are the
emotional charges upon sensa. When thought comes into
existence (and it is no part of my plan to ask how or why that
happens) it brings with it new orders of emotions : emotions
that can arise only in a thinker, and only because he thinks in
certain ways. These emotions we sometimes call feelings;
but in this book I shall avoid so calling them, in order not to
confuse them with the peculiar experiences we enjoy at the
psychical level.

§ 3. Thinking

Feeling provides for thought more than a mere substruc-
ture upon which it rests, and about which it may concern
itself if it is so disposed. In its primary form, thought seems 1
to be exclusively concerned with it, so that feeling affords
its sole and universal subject-matter. This is not to say that

1 My reason for saying ‘seems’ and the like, in this section, will be
explained in the next.

THINKING AND FEELING 165

there may not also be a secondary form of thought; to that
question we shall return later. At present, we have to
consider the primary form.

When we think the thoughts which we express in such
words as ‘I am tired’, ‘It is hot to-day’, ‘There is a patch of
blue’, it seems clear that we are thinking about our feelings.
We are becoming aware, by an act of attention, of certain
feelings which at the moment we have; and we are going on
to think of these as standing in certain relations to other
feelings, remembered as past or imagined as possible. Thus,
to say ‘It is hot’ is to classify one of my present sensa as
a temperature-sensum, to compare it with those kinds of
temperature-sensa to which on the whole I am accustomed,
and to express the result of the comparison by saying that it
comes nearer than they to the hotter end of the scale to which
they all belong.

The same thing appears to be true, though not so ob-
viously true, about expressions like ‘That is my hat’. The
reference to my feelings is here not explicit, but it is per-
fectly real. When I say that this is my hat, I am stating
certain relations between certain feelings that I now have
(for example, if I am merely looking at the hat, certain colour-
sensa arranged in a certain way) and other feelings which I
remember having in the past, for example the feelings to
which I should refer by speaking of the ‘look’ of my hat
as I remember it hanging on the peg in my own hall ; and
I am saying that these relations are of such a kind that the
hat at which I am now looking cannot be any other than
mine. To describe all these sensa and the relations between
them would involve almost infinite complications; but that
is no reason for being sceptical about the fact; so familiar a
feat as the recognizing of one’s own hat is really a very
complex achievement, and contains a vast number of
thoughts, in each of which an error is possible.

This type of analysis would seem to hold good in the case
of all the thinking which is called empirical. Even when we
make statements about the shapes or sizes or distances of

1 66 THINKING AND FEELING

bodies, we seem in the last resort to be expressing our
thoughts about the relations between sensa, actual and
possible. If I say ‘These railway lines which look convergent
are really parallel’, I am first of all attending to a certain
pattern of colours which at the moment I see before me; I
am then selecting out of this pattern certain stripes of light
colour which I identify as the railway metals ; I next compare
the pattern made by those stripes with two other kinds of
pattern, first one made by painting similar stripes parallel to
one another, and secondly one made by painting them con-
verging; and lastly, by the admonitory word ‘really’, I am
warning myself that in spite of the resemblance between what
I now see and the second of these patterns, I must not think
that if I travelled along the metals, measuring the distance
between them from time to time, I should get the same kind
of result which I get by passing my fingers along the lines of
that pattern. Once more, the roughest analysis is almost in-
tolerably complicated, and no analysis, however complicated,
would be exhaustive; but this proves, not that the analysis is
mistaken, but that thought is quick.

Thus our experience of the world in space and time, the
‘world of nature’ or ‘external’ world, which means not the
world external to ourselves (for we ourselves are part of it, in
so far as ‘we’ are our bodies ; and if ‘we’ are our minds, there
is no sense in speaking of anything as external to them ) but
the world of things external to one another, the world of
things scattered in space and time, is an experience partly
sensuous (strictly, sensuous-emotional) and partly intel-
lectual: sense being concerned with the colours we see, the
sounds we hear, and so forth; and thought, with the relations
between these things.

But thought itself, as an element in this kind of experience,
is a thing which admits of being thought about; and here
arises the secondary form of thought, in which we think not
about our feelings, detecting relations between one and
another, but about our thoughts : concerning ourselves with
the principles according to which the activity of thought in

THINKING AND FEELING 167

its primary form investigates the relations between feelings,
or (what comes to the same thing) according to which inter-
relations exist between what, on such occasions, we think.
The propositions asserted by thought in this secondary
form may be indifferently described as affirming relations
between one act of thinking and another, or between one
thing we think and another. They may be called laws of
thought, to distinguish them from what are traditionally
called laws of nature; but they are not laws of a mysterious
transcendent world quite separate from the world of nature
or world of sense, they are laws of the second order concern-
ing that world itself. They are arrived at, and at need
verified or amended, by appeal not to the sensuous ex-
perience of seeing a particular colour or hearing a particular
sound on a particular occasion (an experience which, ob-
viously, can help us to formulate or verify or amend only
a law of the first order), but to the intellectual experience of
thinking in certain ways and finding our thoughts connected
in a certain type of order.

This secondary function of thought, or thought of the
second order, traditionally distinguished from thought of
the first order as ‘reason’ from ‘understanding’, ‘philosophy’
from ‘science’, and so forth, has been the subject of much
futile mystification. As anybody can see, all knowledge is
derived from experience; and whatever claims to be know-
ledge must appeal to experience for its credentials and
verification. This is as true of metaphysics, theology, or
pure mathematics as it is of railway time-tables or Wisden’s
Cricketer's Guide. But the word ‘experience’ has acquired a
secondary meaning, being sometimes used in philosophical
jargon for sensuous experience. In that new sense of the
word it is only thoughts of the first order that are concerned
with ‘experience ’ 1 and can be tested by appeal to it; thoughts
of the second order obviously cannot. How, then, are they
verified or checked; and, indeed, how in the first instance
are they arrived at? Kant believed that they were known in
1 This is why thought of the first order is called ‘empirical’.

*68 THINKING AND FEELING

some mysterious way ‘independently of experience’. Some
modern philosophers, rightly rejecting that mystification,
substitute another: maintaining that a sentence in which
we express a thought of the second order is not a statement
about the subject we are ostensibly discussing, but an
announcement declaring the equivalence of two words or
phrases in the language in which we propose to discuss it.
There is no need to criticize such notions in detail. It is
enough to recognize the equivocation upon which they
depend: the major premiss that all knowledge is derived
from experience (where a thought, no less than a sensation,
is implied to be an experience), the minor premiss that a
thought is not an experience, and the resulting inference
that thought of the second order, which in fact is based on
the experience of thinking, is either knowledge in a different
and mysterious sense of the word or not knowledge at all.

§ 4. The Problem of Imagination

Thought in its primary function was described in the
preceding section as concerned with the relations between
sensa. But this description gives rise to a difficulty. A
sensum is present to our minds only in the corresponding
act of sensation. It appears as we perform that act, and
disappears as soon as the act is over. It is ‘given’ in the fact
of so appearing; having been given, it is at once taken away.

Now suppose I hold my hand close to the fire for a
few seconds, and feel a rapidly increasing warmth. At the
moment when the warmth has increased to a painful heat,
what I feel is certainly hotter than what I felt a second before.
But how do I know that it is hotter? The account already
given implies that I have some means of comparing the
sensum I feel now with the sensum I felt a second ago. But
the sensum I felt a second ago is not now present to me; it
has vanished, carried away by the flux of sensation ; it is no
longer there to be compared with its successor. In the same
way, future sensa, possible sensa, other people’s sensa, are
sensa not present to me here and now, and are therefore not

THINKING AND FEELING 169

things whose relations with each other, or with the sensa
now present to me, I am in a position to discuss. Hence
the phrase ‘relations between sensa’ is meaningless unless it
applies to relations between sensa present to the same person
at the same time. Nor does even that limitation entirely
justify the phrase; for it seems probable that the act of
comparing two simultaneous sensa and considering the
relation between them must always occupy a period of time
during which these sensa have passed away, giving place
to others. The flux of sense, it would seem, destroys any
sensum before it has lasted long enough to permit of its
relations being studied.

This difficulty is concealed, in current philosophical works
where views are maintained resembling those expressed in
the earlier part of the foregoing section, by the adoption of
a vocabulary in which certain characteristic features of sensa
are implicitly denied. Sensa are called ‘sense-data’, where
the term ‘data’ means not what the word ‘given’ was just now
explained as meaning, but something totally different: it
means given and retained, established or fixed like the
datum-line of a survey or the data on which a scientific
hypothesis is erected, and by reference to which it is tested.
And even where the word used is ‘sensum’, not ‘sense-datum’,
it is used with the same implication. This implication is of
course wholly false : it consists in ascribing to sensa exactly
the opposite of those characteristics which as sensa they
possess. But the false implication is reinforced, as it were
hypnotically, by a whole series of other terms. For example,
our relation to our sensa is described as ‘acquaintance’ with
them. But you cannot be acquainted with a sensum. To be
acquainted with a town or a book or a man is to have come
into contact with it or him on a variety of occasions ; a person
or thing with which one is acquainted is a recurring feature
of one’s experience, recognized in the recurrence as identical
with his or its past self. But sensa neither persist nor recur.
Redness may recur, and a man may therefore be acquainted
with it; but not this red patch. Grief may recur, and a man

i7o THINKING AND FEELING

may be acquainted with grief; but this feeling of unhappiness
is uniquely present in this act of feeling it, and has never
been felt before, however often others like it have been felt.
Again, the truth of an empirical proposition is said to be
tested by ‘appealing’ to sensa, that is, by finding out whether
in certain circumstances those sensa present themselves to
us which would present themselves if the proposition were
true ; but this implies that I can now know what certain sensa,
not present to me, would be like if they were present to me,
and can say ‘These are, or are not, the sensa I expected’,
comparing sensa which I now have with some idea of them
which I framed in advance of having them; and it should be
explained how this is possible.

We are confronted with two alternatives. Either the
people who use all this language (including ourselves in the
preceding section) are talking the most complete imaginable
nonsense, or else they are systematically misusing the word
‘ser.sum’ and all its cognates; using it to mean not the
momentary and evanescent colours, sounds, scents, and the
rest which in sensation we actually ‘feel’, but something
different which these writers mistake or substitute for them.
In order to impute an error not too gross to be plausible,
let us suppose that there are these other things, and that in
certain ways they are very much like sensa, but differ from
sensa chiefly in not being wholly fluid and evanescent; so that
any one of them may be retained in the mind as an object of
attention after the moment of sensation is past, or anticipated
before it occurs.

If there is such a class of entities as these, its members are
obviously not sensa, and the activity correlative to them is
not sensation ; but they may very well be the things which
are called sensa in the philosophies to which I have referred,
and by discovering what kind of things they really are we
may be able to reinterpret those philosophies in such a way
as to rescue them from the imputation of being sheerly
nonsensical.

This will be the task of the next two chapters. I shall there

THINKING AND FEELING 171

try to show that there are such things, to be identified with
what Hume (whose account of them I shall take as my
starting-point) called ‘ideas’ as distinct from ‘impressions’.
I shall try to show that there is a special activity of mind
correlative to them, and that this is what we generally call
imagination, as distinct from sensation on the one hand and
intellect on the other. This activity, the 9avTaaia without
which, according to Aristotle, intellection is impossible, the
‘blind but indispensable faculty’ which, according to Kant,
forms the link between sensation and understanding, deserves
in my opinion a more thorough study than it has yet received,
both for its own sake (in which aspect it provides, as I shall
later argue, the basis for a theory of the aesthetic experience)
and for the sake of its place in the general structure of
experience as a whole, as the point at which the activity of
thought makes contact with the merely psychic life of feeling.

Note to p. 164: Psychology , true and false . — It follows from the distinction
stated on p. 157 that whereas, in order to study the nature of feeling, it is
necessary to ascertain what persons who feel are actually doing, in order to
study the nature of thinking it is necessary to ascertain both what persons who
think are actually doing and also whether what they are doing is a success or a
failure. Thus a science of feeling must be ‘empirical’ (i.e. devoted to ascertain-
ing and classifying ‘facts’ or things susceptible of observation), but a science of
thought must be ‘normative’, or (as I prefer to call it) ‘criteriological’, i.e. con-
cerned not only with the ‘facts’ of thought but also with the ‘criteria’ or standards
which thought imposes on itself. ‘Criteriological’ sciences, e.g. logic, ethics,
have long been accepted as giving the correct approach to the study of thought.
In the sixteenth century the name ‘psychology’ was invented to designate an
‘empirical’ science of feeling. In the nineteenth century the idea got about that
psychology could not merely supplement the old ‘criteriological’ sciences by
providing a valid approach to the study of feeling, but could replace them by
providing an up-to-date and ‘scientific’ approach to the study of thought. Owing
to this misconception there are now in existence two things called ‘psychology’:
a valid and important ‘empirical’ science (both theoretical and applied) of
feeling, and a pseudo-science of thought, falsely professing to deal ‘empirically’
with things which, as forms of thought, can be dealt with only ‘criteriologically’.
Its vast and rapidly-growing literature shows all the familiar marks of a pseudo-
science (self-contradiction; the enunciation of ‘discoveries’ which are really
platitudes; the appeal to facts which are irrelevant to the problems under dis-
cussion ; the evasion of criticism on the plea that ‘the science is in its infancy’,
See.) ; it is completely discredited among those (historians, &c.) whose business
is to study human thought in its actuality; and I make no apology for ignoring
and contradicting, in this book and elsewhere, the errors taught by its exponents.

IX

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION
§ i. Terminology

It will be best, before directly attacking the problem raised
at the end of the preceding chapter, to consider a distinction
which might be thought to offer a safe approach to the theory
of imagination. This is the common-sense distinction be-
tween, for example, ‘really seeing’ a patch of colour and
‘imagining’ one. I raise my head, look out of the window,
and ‘see’ an expanse of green grass. I shut my eyes and, with
a conscious effort, ‘imagine’ the same green expanse, or at
any rate a green expanse very much like it. On the first
occasion, the colour presents itself to me when I am looking
at something that is ‘really there’; on the second, it is a
‘figment’ of my imagination, which somehow generates it
in the absence of these conditions.

This common-sense distinction, when we examine it, will
be found very obscure; and when at last we are able to say
what it means, this will be something very different from
what at first sight it seems to mean. The examination will be
troublesome and perhaps tedious, but fruitful ; for the com-
mon-sense distinction expresses (or, one might almost as
well say, conceals) a truth of great importance, which we
should never clearly understand if we swallowed the common-
sense view uncritically; still less, perhaps, if we impatiently
dismissed it as nonsense.

We must begin by choosing a terminology in which the
common-sense distinction can be easily and not too un-
naturally expressed. The terminologies actually in use fall
into two groups according as it is desired to emphasize the
similarity between the seen and imagined colours (or the
acts of seeing and imagining them), or the difference. To
the first class belong those in which ‘really seeing’ and
‘imagining’ are both called sensation, and what we ‘really

I

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 173

see’ and ‘imagine’ are indifferently called sensa or sense-data.
In order to distinguish between the two cases, qualifications
must then be added: for example, a distinction will be made
between veridical and illusory sensa.

In the second type, the words ‘sensation’ and ‘sensum’
are confined to the case in which we ‘really see’, and other
words are used for the case in which we ‘imagine’; for ex-
ample, that which we imagine is called an image. Thus we
get a neat verbal parallelism between sensing a sensum and
imagining an image; but the difficulty then is to find a pair
of generic terms, one to cover both sensing and imagining,
the other to cover both sensa and images; and to show how
these two pairs of specific terms are related to each other and
to their respective genera.

My own terminology in this chapter will be as follows.
As a generic term to cover both the act of ‘really seeing’
and the act of ‘imagining’, I shall use the word ‘sensation’.
When I need a verb, I shall use the verb ‘to sense’.

That which we sense I shall call a ‘sensum’. The various
species of sensation I shall call ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘smelling’,
&c., and the corresponding species of sensa ‘colours’,
‘sounds’, ‘scents’, &c.; in every case irrespective of the
distinction between the two cases distinguished at the
beginning of this chapter.

As specific names for those two cases I shall use the terms
‘real sensation’ (with the verb ‘really sense’, if it is needed),
and ‘imagination’ (with the verb ‘imagine’). The species of
real sensation I shall call ‘really seeing’, ‘really hearing’, &c.
That which we really sense I shall call a ‘real sensum’, and
its species ‘real colours’, ‘real sounds’, & c. That which we
imagine I shall call an ‘imaginary sensum’; its species,
‘imaginary colours’, ‘imaginary sounds’, &c.

It may possibly be worth while to forestall a misunder-
standing. A reader, bearing in mind such distinctions as
that between real diamonds and imitation diamonds, may
fancy that something ex hypothesi different from real sensation
cannot be a kind of sensation, as I have been professing, but

4436 N

17 + SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

must be something different from sensation, as paste is
different from diamond. But I am not using the word ‘real’
in this way. I am using it as it is used in the phrase ‘real
property’, which does not imply that personal property is
property falsely so called, but that the kind of property called
real is property in rebus , where res has the meaning of a
physical thing.

My reason for adopting this terminology is, chiefly, that
it stands nearer than any other to everyday speech, and there-
fore begs fewer questions. The philosopher who tries to
‘speak with the vulgar and think with the learned’ has this
advantage over one who adopts an elaborate technical
vocabulary: that the use of a special ‘philosophical language’
commits the user, possibly even against his will, to accepting
the philosophical doctrines which it has been designed to
express, so that these doctrines are surreptitiously and
dogmatically foisted upon every disputant who will consent
to use the language : whereas, if the language of every day is
used, problems can be stated in a way which does not com-
mit us in advance to a particular solution. This gives the
user of common speech an advantage, if what he wants to do
is to keep the discussion open and above-board and to get at
the truth. For a philosopher whose aim is not truth but
victory it is of course a disadvantage; he would be wiser to
insist at the start upon using a terminology so designed that
all statements couched in it assume the contentions he is
anxious to prove. And this in effect is what those philo-
sophers are doing who profess themselves unable to grasp
the meaning of this or that statement until it has been
translated into their own terminology. To insist that every
conversation shall be conducted in one’s own language is
in men of the world only bad manners; in philosophers it is
sophistry as well.

§ 2. History of the Problem: Descartes to Locke

The historical background of the problem here to be
discussed extends, so far as we need consider it, from Des-

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 175

cartes to Kant. The main constructive efforts of medieval
philosophy had been based on assuming that sensation in
general gives us real acquaintance with the real world; but
this assumption was undermined by the sceptics of the
sixteenth century, and the problem of distinguishing real
sensation from imagination, and thus (without ceasing to
experience the latter) guarding against the illusions which
arise from mistaking the one for the other, was placed in the
forefront of philosophical thought by Descartes.

Descartes, acquiescing to that extent in the views of the
sceptics, admitted that by direct inspection there was no
way of deciding whether he was really sitting in front of the
fire or only dreaming that he was sitting in front of the fire:
in our terminology, of distinguishing either between real
sensa and the corresponding imaginary sensa, or between real
sensation and the corresponding imagination. This is the
point of Descartes’s doctrine concerning the deceitfulness or
untrustworthiness of the senses. He did not deny that there
was such a thing as real sensation ; what he denied was that
we could distinguish it by any test short of mathematical
reasoning from imagination; and this denial he made the
foundation of his own philosophy, proving as it did that
a system based on the assumption that real sensation could
be thus distinguished from imagination was vicious from
the beginning.

Hobbes accepted the same position and stated it, with his
usual trenchancy, in a more downright form. Granted that
there is no way of telling real sensation from imagination by
direct inspection, and that what we cannot know about them
by that method we cannot know at all, since immediacy is
an essential feature of our sensuous experience (so he seems
to argue), we had better deny the distinction outright, and
use the two terms indifferently, as synonyms. That, at any
rate, is the view he adopts in the first chapter of Leviathan.
Sensa, he remarks, are ‘fancy, the same waking that sleeping
. . . so that sense in all cases is nothing else but original
fancy’.

176 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

Spinoza agrees rather with Hobbes than with Descartes,
and accepts it as a principle that all sensation is imagination,
so that imaginatio becomes his regular term for sensation
( "Ethics , ii. xvii, scholium). Imaginatio is for him not a mode
of thought, and in speaking of it he never uses the words
idea or percipere , which with him invariably refer to opera-
tions of the intellect; imagination is not an activity but a
passivity, and consequently imaginations, just as they con-
tain no truth, ‘contain no error’ (loc. cit.).

Leibniz is of the same opinion. For him, sensa do indeed
deserve the name of idea; but they are ideas of a peculiar
kind, ideas essentially confused, which if they could be
brought to a state of distinctness would lose their sensuous
character and turn into thoughts. In their native sensuous-
ness, therefore, they are a kind of dreams or phantoms; not
some of them only, but all of them. It is only with Locke
(Essay, n. xxx) that an attempt is made to distinguish ‘real
ideas’ from ‘fantastical’. But this is not to say that Locke
distinguishes real from imaginary sensa. That he does not
do any more than Hobbes and the Cartesians, with whom
he agrees that no such distinction exists, though he differs
from them as to the reason: they say that all sensa are
imaginary, he says that all are real : with his own italics, ‘our
simple Ideas are all real. The only ideas he will allow to be
fantastical are certain complex ideas which we form at will by
arbitrarily combining simple ones.

The conception of all sensa as real met with no success at
the hands of his followers; as we shall see, Berkeley and
Hume thought it a matter of urgency to disown it. It has
been revived by the neo-realists of our own day; in the case
of Professor Alexander, with conscious indebtedness to its
author; and it is an idea which well deserves revival as a
bold piece of radical empiricism. But Locke was not a radical
empiricist; he was a common-sense philosopher who entirely
believed in the world of bodies as described by Newton;
and consequently this conception could not be made to
harmonize with the setting in which he placed it. As it

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 177

stands in his text, it is an outrageous sophism. Real ideas
he defines as ‘such as have a conformity with the real Being
and Existence of things, or with their Archetypes’. But
when he goes on to say that simple ideas are all real because
they ‘answer and agree to those powers of things which
produce them in our Minds’, he has forgotten this; he is
treating the proposition that sensa are caused in us by the
action of external bodies (the same proposition which, to
Hobbes and the Cartesians, had proved them imaginary) as
equivalent to the proposition that they are real; in other
words, he is substituting, as a definition of ‘reality’, the rela-
tion of effect to cause for the relation of ectype to archetype.

But there is also in Locke the germ of a quite different
method for distinguishing real ideas from fantastical. A
fantastical idea he describes as one which the mind ‘makes
to itself’. Complex ideas are sometimes fantastical, because
they are sometimes ‘voluntary combinations’ of simple ones,
in which case ‘the Mind of Man uses some kind of Liberty’
in forming them. Simple ideas can never be fantastical,
because they can never be ‘Fictions at Pleasure’; the mind
‘can make to itself no simple Idea’. Now Locke does not
seem to have realized the fact, but these statements made it
possible for him to give an account of the way in which we
distinguish real from fantastical ideas without any reference
to their originals or lack of original. All he had to do was to
assume that our powers of what he calls reflection enable us
to distinguish a voluntary action from an involuntary passio :
that we can tell by introspection when we are acting and
when we are being acted upon. If so, introspection will
serve by itself to distinguish real from imaginary sensa. It
will not, of course, detect any difference between the sensa
themselves, for sensa are not present to introspection, but
only to sensation; but it will detect a difference between the
activities by which we sense them. In the one case, the
activity will be introspectively recognized as voluntary; in
the other, as involuntary: not an actio but a passio.

This ‘introspection theory’ (as I shall call it) of the distinc-

178 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

tion between real sensation and imagination was not deve-
loped by Locke, though any intelligent reader could have
developed it from his text, and at least one extremely in-
telligent reader did so.

§ 3. Berkeley: the Introspection Theory

For Berkeley ‘ideas of Sense’ are distinct from ‘ideas of
Imagination’ ( Principles of Human Knowledge , i, § 30). The
terms ate borrowed from Malebran che’s Recherche de la-
Verite\ but Malebranche is content to state the difference
physiologically, explaining that an idea, which he regards
as simply a felt disturbance of our organism, may be due
either to the impact of an external body or to a self-initiated
change in the organism itself. For Berkeley, this appeal to
physiology is a mere evasion. The problem is not to invent
a theory accounting for the origin of two different kinds of
idea; it is to explain how in point of fact people know, before
they come to invent any such theory, to which kind a given
idea belongs. The distinction, therefore, must be visible to
ordinary people and verifiable by them. That is to say, it
must be stated in terms of ideas ; no purpose is served by
stating it in terms of the relation between ideas and the
human organism or in general the physical world. So
Berkeley attempts to state it purely in terms of ideas ; and
lays down the proposition that ‘the ideas of Sense are more
strong, lively, and distinct than those of the Imagination’.

This might mean either of two things. It might refer to
a distinction in something called ‘strength’ or ‘liveliness’
between real and imaginary sensa; or it might refer to
a distinction (necessarily of a quite different kind, though
called by the same name) between the act of real sensation
and the act of imagination. In the first case it could hardly
mean anything except that a real sound (for instance) is
louder than an imaginary one; and that this difference in
audible quality is all we mean when we call them respectively
real and imaginary. In the second case it would mean that
a real sound forces itself upon us in a way in which an

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 179

imaginary one does not; a real sound is heard whether we
will or no, whereas an imaginary one can be summoned up,
banished, or replaced by another at will. Here the difference
is not between the sounds, but between the experiences of
hearing them; it is a difference appreciable not by the
ear, but by the reflective or introspective consciousness in
which we are aware of these experiences. It is the second of
these positions that Berkeley is maintaining, and so attentive
a student of Locke no doubt arrived at it from a study of the
passage quoted above.

But it is not a tenable position. The fact that I cannot
evoke or control certain ideas at will is according to this
doctrine more than an infallible sign of their being real as
distinct from imaginary; it is what we mean by calling them
real as distinct from imaginary. There are not two facts with
a relation between them, there is one fact. But this is not
true. There are two different facts, which commonly no
doubt are united, but can on occasion occur separately.
The extreme case is the hallucination of mental disease, where
the patient is obsessed by imaginary sights, sounds, and the
like, which he is altogether unable to control; but even in
the healthiest organism the same thing is observable. A
man who has been horrified by certain sights and sounds
cannot for some time banish them from his mind; he con-
tinues to imagine the crash, the blood, the cries, for all his
efforts to stop. That, on Berkeley’s principle, should be
proof that he is not imagining them but really seeing them.
In fact it only proves that the extent to which we can control
our imagination by a deliberate act of will is very limited.

§ 4. Berkeley: the Relation Theory

As if dissatisfied with this theory of the distinction,
Berkeley at once proceeds to state another, which I shall call
the relation theory. Ideas of sense ‘have likewise a steadiness,
order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, . . . but
in a regular train or series. . . . Now the set rules, or estab-
lished methods, wherein the Mind we depend on excites in

i So SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

us the ideas of Sense, are called the law of Nature, and these

we learn by experience.’

This may be paraphrased as follows. Even if there is no
such difference between a real sensation and an imagination,
considered by themselves, as might be stated by calling the
one involuntary and the other voluntary, there is yet a way
in which real and imaginary sensa can be distinguished
without appealing to any supposed world of bodies : namely,
by considering the relation in which each of them stands to
other sensa. The laws of nature are (Berkeley tells us) not
laws concerning the relations between bodies or bodily
movements or bodily forces, but laws concerning the rela-
tions between sensa. To formulate them in terms of body
may be convenient, because it is brief; but it is only a short-
hand method of putting what, if expressed in full, would
turn out to be a statement about the ways in which we have
found certain sensa to be related to certain others, and in
which we expect like sensa to be related in the future. If we
say that matter is indestructible, we mean something like
this: if at one time a person has certain sensa of sight and
touch, such as are ordinarily referred to by saying that he
sees a stone lying in a certain place, then if he continues to
watch and to touch he will have other sensa of the kind
which we describe by saying either (a) that the stone is still
there, or (b) that it is moving away, or (c) that it is breaking
up; whereas, if he has the sensa we should describe by saying
that the stone has disappeared, it is open to some one to put
himself in such a position that he will have further sensa
whose relation to these others will be described by saying
that he now knows where it has gone to. As our great
modern Berkeleian, Lord Russell, puts it, the programme
is to resolve propositions about bodies into propositions
about sense-data.

Now it is Berkeley’s contention that the laws of nature are
obeyed by ‘ideas of Sense’ and not by ‘ideas of Imagination’.
The former, as Professor Price admirably expresses it,
belong to ‘families’ or groups of sensa connected by fixed

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 181

rules determining (for example) what appearance will be
presented by a body two feet away to an eye which from
three feet away sees it in such and such a manner; and again,
how a body so appearing to the eye will feel when touched
by the hand. ‘Ideas of Imagination’, on the contrary,
Berkeley thinks to be what Price, following Broad, calls
‘wild’ : they belong to no family; there are no rules according
to which they are linked up with other ideas, similar or
dissimilar.

This doctrine seems true enough at first sight. Dusk is
coming on; I am writing in the window; and glancing back
over my shoulder I see something in a darkened corner of
the room which looks like a black animal crouching there.
Did I really see an animal, or was I imagining it? The
procedure which I use in order to answer my question seems
to be exactly what Berkeley is suggesting. I begin by appeal-
ing to the ‘laws of Nature’. If there was really an animal
there, either it will stay there or it will go away. I turn on
the light and search the place where I saw it. There is no
animal there. I search the rest of the room, with the same
result. The door is shut, and there is no nook in which it may
be hiding, or hole through which it may have escaped. I con-
clude that it was not a real animal but an imaginary one, or
in other words that I was not really seeing but imagining.

That is no doubt very much how we proceed. But it does
not really bear out Berkeley’s contention. For the imaginary
animal does not really disobey the laws of nature. It may
disobey some of them, but it obeys others. It is therefore
not ‘wild’ ; it belongs to a family, though not the family to
which at first we tried to refer it. There is what Berkeley
himself calls order about its appearance. My black animal
has come before; it comes in the dusk; it comes when I am
tired; it comes bringing a slight but perceptible feeling of
fear to a person who, as a little boy, was frightened of the
dark; in short, though it does not belong to a family which
I can describe in physical terms, it plainly does belong to one
describable in psychological. And Berkeley seems to be

1 82 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

maintaining that whereas the groups of sensa which would
ordinarily be called bodies have pedigrees and obey laws,
those which would ordinarily be called minds have none, and
conduct themselves in an absolutely lawless (as he calls it,
random) manner. But this will not convince any one to-day.
No one is entirely satisfied with the state of psychological
science; but no one would push his dissatisfaction so far as
to contend that the events we call psychological occur
without any order or regularity at all.

Can we restate Berkeley’s distinction in an improved form
by suggesting that ‘ideas of Sense’ or real sensa are interre-
lated according to the laws of physics, and ‘ideas of Imagina-
tion’ or imaginary sensa according to those of psychology?
No; there are good reasons against that. In the first place,
the two sets of laws cannot be so thoroughly disentangled
from each other. Real sensa obey psychological laws no less
than imaginary ones ; and the question whether psychology
may not in the end be reducible to physics is still sub judice.
Secondly, if both sets of laws are learnt by experience, it
follows that we can only know what the laws of physics are
by studying our real sensa, and what the laws of psychology
are by studying our imaginary sensa. We cannot, therefore,
begin to ascertain what laws there are, of either kind, unless
we can first distinguish with certainty between the different
kinds of ‘ideas’, as we must distinguish ideas of sight from
ideas of hearing before we can begin to build up the sciences
of optics and acoustics. If we need rules in order to distin-
guish real sensa from imaginary ones, it cannot be sensation,
the undistinguished mixture of real sensation and imagina-
tion, that teaches us those rules. And this argument applies
equally against the view that imaginary sensa obey laws of their
own, and the view that they are completely wild. This is the
starting-point of Kant’s view, to which we shall come later.

§ 5. Hume

It was no doubt this difficulty which led Hume, when he
reconsidered the same problem, to drop Berkeley’s relation

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 183

theory and adopt his introspection theory. Hume attached
great importance to this theory, and expounds it in the open-
ing sentences of his Treatise of Human Nature. This was
evidently because, setting himself the task of showing how
all our knowledge is derived from what Berkeley called ideas
of sense and what he himself called ‘impressions’, he rightly
took it for granted that the whole derivation would be vitiated
unless these could be distinguished from ideas of imagina-
tion, which he called ‘ideas’. His first task, therefore, was to
place this distinction on a firm basis. But how? Not in
Locke’s manner, by referring back from ideas them-
selves to their ‘originals’ or ‘archetypes’, the bodies which
in the one case cause them and in the other do not.
Berkeley’s criticism had shown that to be impossible. The
distinction must be a distinction among ideas as such. But
of Berkeley’s tw r o theories, the second was unworkable be-
cause it reversed the relation between distinguishing ideas of
sense from ideas of imagination and ascertaining the laws
of nature. The distinction must come first; only when it
is complete can we ascertain what the laws of nature
are. The distinction must therefore depend on a difference,
perceptible by direct inspection, between the two types of
experience.

Thus Hume (unless I misunderstand the whole drift of
his thought) arrived at his own statement of the introspec-
tion theory, as set forth in the first two sentences of his
Treatise. ‘All the perceptions of the human mind resolve
themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call im-
pressions and ideas. The difference betwixt these consists
in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike
upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or
consciousness.’ His meaning here is the same as that which
we have found Berkeley expressing in the words ‘more
strong, lively, and distinct’. He does not mean that, if all
possible sensa of light, for example, are arranged in a scale
of intensity from a dazzling brilliance at one end to invisibility
at the other, there is a point on this scale above which all the

x8* SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

brighter sensa are real sensa, while the dimmer ones below
it are imaginary. The passage in which he makes this clear
is that in which he says ‘that idea of red, which we form in
the dark, and that impression which strikes our eyes in
sunshine, differ only in degree, not in nature’. A difference
in brightness or saturation would obviously be a difference
in nature. He refers to a difference not among sensa but
among sensations. When he speaks of the superior force or
liveliness of an impression he means that the act or state of
‘perceiving’ an ‘impression’ is one which we find upon
reflection and experiment to be forced upon us even against
our will; by the ‘faintness’ of an ‘idea’ he refers to the fact
(or supposed fact) that perceptions of this kind have not
sufficient vigour to force themselves upon us without our
consent, but are subservient to our command. In short, the
distinction between real sensation and imagination is resolved
into the distinction between our inability and our ability of
set purpose to control, excite, suppress, or modify our
sensory experiences.

Hume certainly does not state this doctrine as clearly as
one might wish. In particular, he makes admissions which
contradict it, without attempting to remove the contradic-
tion. ‘In sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent
emotions of soul’, he correctly observes that our ideas conform
to the definition he has given of impressions; but he does
not draw either of the possible inferences : that they really
are impressions, or that his definition was faulty. He excuses
himself by pleading that these cases are exceptional; not
noticing that this implies an appeal to the alternative criterion
which he has rejected, namely that of the relation in which
our various experiences stand to each other. The brilliancy
of a sensum of light is a quality immediately given (to what
Locke called sensation) in the sensum itself; its force or
liveliness is a quality of the activity which Hume calls
perceiving it, immediately given as what Locke calls an idea
of reflection in our awareness of that activity; but excep-
tionalness is something we can only attribute to it when we

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 185

try to think of it as an instance of a rule determining the
relations which our sensa must bear to one another if
they are to be regarded as real sensa. Thus the attempt
to derive all knowledge from sensation has broken down on
the very first page: principles of the kind which Hume
proposes to build upon experience have been surreptitiously
appealed to at the outset, in order to discriminate those parts
of experience which will offer them a secure foundation from
those which will not.

And what if the appeal be allowed ? Granted that cases of
this kind are really exceptional, which modern psychologists
would hesitate to grant, yet they are present as genuine facts
in the body of human experience. The ‘science of Man’,
for which Hume in his Introduction has claimed such a
dominant position at the head of all the sciences, is surely
not so unscientific as to content itself with dismissing whole
classes of well-attested facts as having no value for the study
of its subject, merely because they are less common than
others. The exception ‘proves’ the rule by showing whether
the rule is equal to the task of explaining it; if it is not, it is
proved false. But Hume’s refusal to extend so familiar a
principle of method to the science of human nature was not
a mere freak on his part; it followed from a general theory,
assumed by most modern pre-Kantian philosophers, that
you cannot afford to think accurately about human nature,
because human nature, owing to the element of freedom in
it, is an indeterminate thing, acting at random, so that even
the truest statements about it are only true (as Aristotle said
about the statements of ethical science) ‘for the most part’,
and exceptions do not matter. It was Kant who first showed
that progress in the science of human nature must come, like
progress in any other science, by taking exceptions seriously
and fastening upon the unusual case (that, for example,
of the man who does good to others not in order to win
their good opinion, and not because he enjoys doing it, but
simply because he thinks it his duty) as the peculiarly
instructive one.

1 86 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

§ 6. Kant

By these more rigorous principles of method, Kant was
prevented from accepting a generalization so riddled with
exceptions as that of Hume. On Kant’s view as to the
structure of experience, if there is any distinction between
real and imaginary sensa, it cannot lie in a difference of ‘force
and liveliness’, that is, in the involuntary or voluntary
character of the acts by which we ‘perceive’ them. It must
lie elsewhere; and at first sight Kant seems in effect to
restate Berkeley’s second position, and to place the distinc-
tion in the way in which a given sensum is related to others.
Reality, according to him, is a category of the understanding,
and understanding is thought in its primary function, as
concerned with the relations between sensa.

But Kant is not in fact returning to Berkeley. According
to Berkeley, the ‘laws of nature’ are without exception
learned from ‘experience’; that is, they are all empirical laws,
laws of the first order, discovered and verified by noting the
relations between sensa. Hume tentatively, and Kant more
explicitly, attacked this doctrine, and showed that these
first-order laws implied second-order laws, which Kant called
‘principles of the understanding’. Now, relatively to the
first-order laws of nature, so far as they have been ascertained
at any given moment in the history of scientific discovery,
this or that sensum may very well be ‘wild’, in the sense that
the laws as yet known give no account of its place in any
family. But this cannot be the case relatively to laws of the
second order. It is a principle of the understanding that
every event must have a cause. No event that comes under
our notice can escape this principle. The furthest length to
which it can go towards wildness in that direction is a failure
on our part to discover what, in particular, its cause is.

Thus Kant’s discovery of second-order laws involves
the discovery that there are no wild sensa. At the same time,
it enables him to explain what we mean when we say that
wild sensa exist. We are saying that certain sensa, though

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 187

in the light of the second-order laws we know that they
must admit of interpretation, have not yet been actually
interpreted, and perhaps cannot be interpreted except
through the discovery of first-order laws as yet unknown
to us.

The theory of imagination thus passes through three
distinct stages from Descartes to Kant. (1) To most of the
seventeenth-century philosophers it seemed clear that all
sensation is simply imagination. The common-sense distinc-
tion was simply wiped out, and the existence of anything
which could be called real sensation was denied. It was
admitted that our sensa are caused by the action upon our
bodies of other bodies (of whose existence we were assured
not, of course, by sensation but by thought), but the fact
that imagination has an external cause does not make it any
the less imagination. (2) The English empiricists tried to
restate the common-sense distinction, but were unable to
reach an agreement : nor did any one of them put forward a
theory which could actually (even if itself defensible) be
regarded as a defence of that distinction: for none of their
theories quite tallied with it. (3) Kant (with important help
from Leibniz and Hume) approached the problem along a
new line. Instead of trying to conceive real sensa and imagin-
ary sensa as two co-ordinate species of the same genus, the
conception which, in spite of the empiricists’ attempt to
revive it, had been once for all refuted by the Cartesians, he
conceived the difference between them as a difference of
degree. 1 For him, a real sensum can only mean one which
has undergone interpretation by the understanding, which
alone has the power to confer the title real; an imaginary
sensum will then mean one which has not yet undergone that
process.

1 Here and elsewhere I use this word in the traditional philosophical sense,
where differences of degree are understood as involving differences of kind ;
as in Locke’s ‘three degrees of knowledge’, where each ‘degree’ is at once a
fuller realization of the essence of knowledge than the one below (more
certain, less liable to error) and also a fresh kind of knowledge. See Essay on
Philosophical Method, pp. 54-5, 69-77.

i88

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

§ 7. 1 Illusory Sens a'

The common-sense distinction between real and imaginary
sensa, although flatly denied by the Cartesians, retains a
certain hold on our thought. When common sense makes
a distinction, philosophy is well advised to think it possible
that a distinction of some kind exists ; but is certainly not
obliged to assume that the account of it given by common
sense is correct.

If there is anything in the view which we have found im-
plied by Kant, the common-sense distinction can be justified;
but it cannot be a distinction between two classes of sensa.
This, as we have seen, was admitted even by the English
empiricists; but it is not admitted by common sense; and,
as we are not bound by the findings of any philosophical
school, we must now consider the question directly.

We can do this best by beginning with an analysis of
illusory sensa. At first sight, it would seem a satisfactory
development of the common-sense view to say that, sensa
being in themselves of two kinds, real and imaginary, an
illusory sensum is an imaginary one mistaken for a real.
If I dream that I am looking at sea, sky, and mountains, the
colours I see are imaginary colours, but in so far as the
dream contains an element of illusion I take them for real
ones. It is this error that converts imaginary sensa into
illusory. There is thus no special class of illusory sensa.
There is nothing special in these colours, in virtue of which
they are illusory; to describe them as illusory is only to say
that an error has been made about them. In order to salve
our pride as thinkers, we may pretend that the error was due
to them, not to ourselves, and accuse them of somehow
forcing us to make it. But this is hypocrisy. There can be
nothing of such a kind as to force a person who thinks about
it into error. And if there were, the error could never be
corrected, so that we should never be able to call the thing
illusory.

But imaginary sensa are not the only ones about which

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 189

mistakes are made. Mistakes of the same general kind are
made about real sensa, especially if they present themselves
to us in unfamiliar circumstances. When a child or savage
(or for that matter a dog or cat) first sees his face in a glass,
he is very likely to be deceived, by the resemblance between
what he now sees and another person’s face seen through a
frame or opening, into thinking that he is looking at a face
situated behind the plane of the mirror. Actually he is
looking at his own face, situated as usual on the front side
of his head. He is looking at it under conditions which are
unfamiliar to him, but are not at all unfamiliar to myself,
who in shaving have no difficulty about correlating what I
see in the glass with what I feel in using razor and brush.
But the face as seen in the glass is just as illusory to the child
or savage as were the sea, sky, or mountains to me in my
dream.

We were wrong, therefore, to define illusory sensa as
imaginary sensa which we mistake for real ones. Illusory
sensa can be defined without referring to the distinction
between imaginary and real. Any sensum is illusory in so
far as we make an error about it. This error does not consist
in mistaking it for a different sensum. Indeed, it is not easy
to see how that would be possible. All that there can ever
be in a sensum is directly present to us in the act of sensation.
We may be mistaken in believing that another person in our
circumstances would have a similar one ; but we cannot, in
seeing a red patch, mistake it for a blue one. The mistakes
we make about our sensa are mistakes about their relations
with other sensa, possible or expected. The child or savage
is not mistaken, when he looks at the glass, in thinking that
he sees a certain pattern of colours; he is not mistaken in
thinking that it resembles what he sees when he looks at
some one else’s face two feet away ; his mistake lies in thinking
that because of these facts he can touch the face he sees by
feeling behind the glass. Further experience will teach him
that in order to touch it he must feel in front of the glass.
That experience is called learning about reflections, and is an

4436 0

190 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

example of what Berkeley calls learning the laws of nature

by experience.

An illusory sensum, then, is simply a sensum as to which
we make mistakes about the relation in which it stands to
other sensa. The conception of illusion disappears, resolved
into the conception of error.

§ 8. ‘ Appearances' and * Images'

There are certain other conceptions which must be treated
in a similar way. One of these is the conception of appear-
ance.

We say that a distant man ‘looks’ smaller than one close
at hand, or that railway lines ‘look’ convergent, although
the person to whom they so appear knows very well that the
two men are of the same height and that the rails are parallel.
This is an everyday and untechnical way of speaking. Some
philosophers or psychologists would ‘explain’ it by saying
that we must distinguish men, or railway lines, from things
they call ‘appearances’ of men or railway lines; and that when
we say a distant man looks smaller than one close at hand,
although the two are really the same size, we mean that the
appearance of the distant man is smaller than that of the
man close at hand, though the two men themselves are of
the same size. In the case of the railway lines, they will say
that the lines themselves are parallel, but their appearances
convergent.

If this is mere perversity in speech, it is pardonable,
though undesirable. But if it is theory, we must have no
truce with it. If there were really such an ‘appearance’
directly given in sensation, this would constitute, as it were,
an inducement or temptation in sensation itself for us to
make a certain error; and this is impossible, for just as no
sensation can force us to make a mistake about it, so none
can persuade or tempt us to do the same. What we mean
when we say that the distant man looks smaller, or that the
rails look convergent, was explained in the preceding chapter
(p. 1 66 ). Briefly, it comes to this: that we are warning our-

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 191

selves or others against the error of thinking that because
the pattern of colours we now see resembles the patterns
we have seen on occasions of a certain kind, the further sensa
which we may expect on behaving in certain ways will
continue to show the same kind of resemblance. Thus, as
the phrase ‘illusions of sense’ or ‘illusory sensa’ describes
cases in which actual errors are made as to the relations be-
tween sensa, so ‘appearances of sense’ describes cases in
which care is taken that errors of this kind shall not be made.

The same kind of error is expressed by the use of the
word ‘image’. The two errors are similar in that each of
them projects into the sensum, or into a fictitious entity more
or less modelled on the sensum, the mistakes which we make
when we think about it and think confusedly. The victim
of this second delusion will say: ‘All this can be better
expressed by using the word “image”. If we see one man
farther away than another, or look obliquely down on railway
lines, what we see is an image of the thing at which we are
looking. The image of the distant man is really smaller than
that of the nearer; the images of the metals really converge;
the image of the stick in water is really bent; but it does not
follow that the things are like them. That depends on the
conditions under which the images are formed.’

If this is terminology, it is objectionable; if theory, it is
false. As terminology, it suggests an analogy between the
relation of a sensum to a body and the relation of a photo-
graph or drawing to the object photographed or drawn.
This is objectionable, because there is no such analogy. The
essence of the relation between a drawing and the object
drawn is that they are both visibly present to us as bodies
we perceive, and one is called an image of the other in so far
as it is visibly like it. To call that which we see when we look
at railway lines an image of the railway lines is to suggest
that we see the two things separately, whereas the point of
the theory is that we do not; and to suggest that what we see
is a true copy of the railway lines, whereas the statement made
is that it is not. As theory, it is false, because it introduces

192 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

between ourselves and the thing at which we are looking
(i.e. what is visibly present to us as a perceived body) a third
thing, owing to whose interposition we do not see the so-called
object at all; a thing which unless our perceptions are
illusions must be perfectly like the object, and is yet ad-
mitted to be very unlike it. The whole theory is nothing
but an attempt to explain the mistakes we sometimes make
about our sensa by projecting these errors into the sensa
themselves.

§ 9. Conclusion

Now let us return to imagination ; and begin by observing
that when in ordinary speech we are said to imagine some-
thing, what we imagine is not always something ‘not really
there’. A matchbox lies before me. Three of its sides are
turned towards me, and these are the only ones I really see.
But I imagine the other three; one yellow and black, one
blue, and one brown. I also imagine the inside, with
matches lying in it. I imagine the feel of it, and the smell
of its brown sides with their coating of phosphorus com-
pound. These things are all really there, pretty much as I
imagine them. Moreover (this is a point Kant has made),
it is only so far as I imagine them that I am aware of the
matchbox as a solid body at all. A person who could really
see, but could not imagine, would see not a solid world of
bodies, but merely (as Berkeley has it) ‘various colours
variously disposed’. Thus, as Kant says, imagination is an
‘indispensable function’ for our knowledge of the world
around us.

This must be granted; but it may still be urged that in
cases of another kind what we imagine is mere phantoms,
things without reality. I am not quite sure what this means.
When I look at a rainbow, I do not think that I am looking
at an arched and painted structure, over which men might
climb and against which swallows might nest, standing upon
two plots of ground at its two ends. I think I am looking
at rain (though certainly I can see no drops of it) lit by the

SENSATION AND IMAGINATION 193

sunlight and breaking its whiteness into colours. When I say
this, I am rejecting one interpretation of my sensa and
embracing another. The rainbow is ‘really there’ not in one
sense but in two. As a sensum or arrangement of sensa, it is
really there in the sense that I see it; and in that sense my
imaginary beast in the dark corner of the room is really
there, and so are the snakes of delirium tremens. In the
other sense of the phrase, what is really there is the rain and
the sunshine, that is, the things in terms of which I interpret
my sensa.

A person suffering from a bilious attack may see a pattern
of zigzag or embattled lines floating before his eyes. When
I walk uphill too fast, I see in the centre of my field of vision
a nebulous and granular patch of green light, bright in the
middle and fading into red at the edges. I suppose it to have
some connexion with the labouring of my heart, as the other
is connected with digestive trouble. Are these things ‘really
there’? In the first sense, yes; they are sensa actually seen.
In the second sense, an answer can be given only when we
have interpreted them, as we interpreted the rainbow in
terms of rain and sunlight. But this we have already done.
If in seeing the rainbow we are seeing the drops of rain and
the white sunlight, in the embattled lines we are seeing the
bilious attack, and in the green light the labouring heart: as,
when a man goes red in the face, we see his anger, and when
the trees wave their branches we see the wind.

A third type of case. A boy dreams of a fire which destroys
his home while he looks helplessly on. This is a clear case
of imagination, complicated no doubt at the moment by
illusion; when he wakes the illusion is dispelled, but the
imagination (if he ‘remembers’ the dream, that is, continues
to experience it in imagination) remains. Is the fire ‘really
there’? Again, in the first sense, yes. To answer for the
second sense, we must interpret the dream: and how we
shall answer depends on how we interpret. If we interpret
it as meaning that his father’s house will shortly be burnt, or
that a friend’s house is now being burnt, we shall have to say

r 9 4 SENSATION AND IMAGINATION

that the fire is not real, and shall join our voice to that of the
many who ‘seyen that in sweveninges there nis no truth,
but they ben al lesinges’; which merely means that we have
an interpretation, but recognize it to be false, and can
suggest none better. Modern psychologists will connect
the dream with the awakening passions of adolescence which
are tormenting the boy’s body and frightening his soul,
while they destroy the safe and sheltered life he has hitherto
lived. If that interpretation is right, the fire is as real as the
rainbow and the embattled lines. It is the way in which the
boy sees the crisis that has come upon him.

This, then, is the result of our examination. Sensa cannot
be divided, by any test whatever, into real and imaginary;
sensations cannot be divided into real sensations and imagi-
nations. That experience which we call sensation is of one
kind only, and is not amenable to the distinctions between
real and unreal, true and false, veridical and illusory. That
which is true or false is thought; and our sensa are called
real and illusory in so far as we think truly or falsely about
them. To think about them is to interpret them, which
means stating the relations in which they stand to other
sensa, actual or possible. A real sensum means a sensum
correctly interpreted; an illusory sensum, one falsely inter-
preted. And an imaginary sensum means one which has not
been interpreted at all: either because we have tried to
interpret it and have failed, or because we have not tried.
These are not three kinds of sensa, nor are they sensa
corresponding with three kinds of sensory act. Nor are they
sensa which, on being correctly interpreted, are found to be
related to their fellows in three different ways. They are
sensa in respect of which the interpretative work of thought
has been done well, or done ill, or left undone.

The common-sense distinction between real and imagi-
nary sensa is therefore not false. There is a distinction.
But it is not a distinction among sensa. It is a distinction
among the various ways in which sensa may be related to the
interpretative work of thought.

X

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS
§ i . Imagination as Active

We have not yet finished with the introspection theory. The
germs of this theory we found in Locke ; its first clear state-
ment in Berkeley; and in Hume, as we saw, it carried the
entire weight of his theory of knowledge. We rejected it,
because the examples of idees fixes and hallucinations make
it impossible for us to correlate the distinction between real
and imaginary sensa with the distinction between sensa-
tions that are not under the control of our will and those
that are under such control. But this was our only reason
for rejecting it; and we must, in fairness to the theory, ask
ourselves whether it is rejected as altogether mistaken, or
only as overstating something which, when the overstate-
ment is removed, turns out to be true.

Locke himself, as so often, hesitates in his language
between a moderate and an extreme view. To call fantastical
ideas ‘Fictions at Pleasure’ implies an extreme view; to say
that ‘the Mind of Man uses some kind of Liberty’ in form-
ing them implies a far more moderate one; for what kind of
liberty is used ? That is the question we are now to raise.

The thesis to be examined is that, in some way not yet
clearly defined, imagination contrasts with sensation as
something active with something passive, something we do
with something we undergo, something under our control
with something we cannot help, a making with a receiving.
I am being purposely vague, because I am trying at present
merely to restate a common-sense idea which, as common
sense holds it, is nothing if not vague. If we agree to accept
it provisionally in this vague shape, we may hope to make it
more precise afterwards.

Most people quite unthinkingly take the idea for granted.
One can see this from the popularity of the term ‘sense-

196 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

datum’. People who use that word, or in equivalent English
spe .k of what is ‘given’ in sensation, perhaps do not ask
themselves what exactly they mean. Obviously, they are not
thinking of the natural and ordinary sense of the verb ‘to
give’. That would imply that they conceived a patch of
colour, for example, as something transferred on a given
occasion from the ownership of one person called the donor
to that of another called the recipient, to whom he ‘gives’ it
either out of sheer generosity or because he has seen as
much of it as he wants. There is also a technical sense of
dari in scholastic Latin, arising out of the terminology of
logical debate, where datur means ‘it is granted’, that is to
say, you are allowed to assert something. Here datum means
what you are allowed to assert at this point in the debate.
In this sense, if a scholastic philosopher has succeeded to his
own satisfaction in proving the existence of God, he ends his
argument : ergo datur Deus. But people who talk about sense-
data clearly mean more than this, though less than the other
sense. It seems that they are using the term in some mys-
terious sense of their own, meaning by its use (we may
perhaps guess) to call our attention to a contrast between
imagination and sensation which somehow vaguely reminds
them of the contrast between making (say) a paper-knife for
yourself and receiving one as a present from a friend.

There certainly is a contrast of this kind. As usual,
common sense is justified in pointing to a distinction, but
incapable of telling us what the distinction is. When we
begin trying to answer that question for ourselves, we seem
at first only able to say what it is not.

For example, it is not a distinction between activity and
passivity as such. Sensation itself is an activity. Even if we
do it only because we are stimulated to it by forces outside
our control, it is still something which we do. Response to
stimulus is in some sense passive, in so far as it cannot arise
without the stimulus; but it is also active, in so far as it is
a response. If I am a kind of factory for converting wave-
lengths into colours, air-disturbances into sounds, and so

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 197

forth, as the materialists believe (and Locke with them),
there is work done in that conversion; the machinery is
active, even if it is controlled by no manager or foreman.
Even wax and water are active in their own special ways, or
they would not take and retain the seal, or break into waves
at the stone’s impact.

Nor is it a distinction among passivities (things that happen
to us, as distinct from things we do) according as they are
done to us by external bodies impinging on our own, or by
changes arising within our own organism, as Malebranche
maintained. For sensation, as well as imagination, is on its
bodily side a change arising within our own organism, and
due to the energies of that organism itself. The afferent
nerves through whose activity we feel a pressure on a
finger-tip are not solid rods conveying that pressure itself
to the brain; they are functioning in their own way as a
special kind of living tissue; if they ceased to function in that
way, no amount of pressure on the finger could give rise to a
sensation.

Nor is it a distinction among activities (things we do)
between those we do of our own choice and those we cannot
help doing. It is in fact easier to stop seeing this paper, by
shutting one’s eyes, than to stop imagining the frightful
accident which one saw yesterday.

If we reject these false solutions, and yet cling to the belief
that the original distinction was not wholly groundless, our
problem takes shape thus. In some sense or other, imagina-
tion is more free than sensation. Even sensation is not
entirely unfree; it is a spontaneous activity of the living and
sentient organism; but the freedom of imagination goes a
step further. And even imagination is not free in the way
in which the conscious carrying-out of an intention is free;
the freedom it possesses is not the freedom of choice; yet
for all that it is a kind of freedom which is denied to sensa-
tion. Regarded as an activity or manifestation of freedom,
then, imagination seems to occupy a place intermediate
between the less free activity of mere feeling and the more

198 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

free activity of what is generally called thought. Our task

is to define this intermediate place.

§ 2. The Traditional Confusion of Sense with Imagination

At this point we must return to the difficulty stated at the
end of Chapter VIII. That difficulty arose out of the
question : How can we think about relations between sensa ?
As a possible solution, I suggested that when people (includ-
ing ourselves) talk about relations between sensa they are
really talking not about sensa but about things of another
kind, like sensa in certain ways, but unlike them in others;
and that these other things belong to a region of experience
which we call not sensation but imagination. Thus, it was
suggested, imagination forms a kind of link between sensa-
tion and intellect, as Aristotle and Kant agreed in main-
taining. If this suggestion can be made good, we shall be in
a fair way towards answering the question how in respect
of its freedom imagination is intermediate between feeling,
as less free than itself, and intellect as more free.

We found in Chapter VIII that sensation must be regarded
as a flux of activity in which, however few or however many
distinct sensory acts are going on together at any one time,
each is no sooner achieved than it gives place to another.
In each act we sense a colour, a sound, a scent, or the like,
which can be present to us only in our performance of the
corresponding act. As soon as the act is over, the sensum
has vanished, never to return. Its esse is sentiri.

Objection may easily be raised to this last phrase as an
overstatement. ‘Naturally’, it may be said, ‘we cannot see
a colour without seeing it. But what could be more absurd
than to argue that, because we have stopped seeing it, the
colour has ceased to exist? For all we know, colours may
perfectly well go on existing when we are not looking at
them.’ 1 The objection is an excellent example of ‘meta-
physics’ in the sense in which that word has at various times

1 I paraphrase Professor G. E. Moore, ‘The Nature and Reality of Objects
of Perception’, in his Philosophical Studies, pp. 31 seqq.

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 199

become a term of merited abuse. For all we know, chim-
aeras may bombinate in a vacuum, and a hundred angels
stand on the point of a needle. And there is a kind of
pleasure to be got by indulging in these metaphysical fairy-
tales, somewhat like the pleasure of talking nonsense. It is
the pleasure of allowing an overstrained and jaded intellect
to kick up its heels without a load on its back. There is also
a pleasure to be got by philosophical thinking; but a very
different one. The fairy-tale about the existence of un-
sensed sensa, no doubt, is believed by the people who
indulge in it to be a piece of philosophical thinking. Their
reason for this belief is that unless it were true they think
propositions like the following would be nonsense: ‘If
these conditions had been fulfilled, I should have been per-
ceiving a sense-datum intrinsically related to this sense-
datum in this way.’ 1 But even if the belief in question were
true, propositions of this kind would still be nonsense unless
it were true not merely that a sensum exists apart from our
sensation of it, but that in this state of apartness it is open
to our inspection; we have it before our mind in such a way
that we can appreciate its qualities, compare them with
those of other sensa, and so forth. The question is not one of
metaphysics, whether colours exist or not when we do not
see them; it is a question of epistemology, whether we can
‘have them before our mind’ in the above sense otherwise
than by seeing them; and, if so, how. If we cannot, proposi-
tions of the kind in question are all nonsensical; if we can,
the description of colours as ‘sense-data’ (or ‘sensa’) is either
false, or is saved from being false only by an ambiguity in the
word ‘sensation’ and its cognates.

I have quoted Professor Moore not because he is unusual
in this respect but because he is typical ; and not because he
is an exceptionally confused thinker but because he is an
exceptionally clear one. He is merely expounding a tradi-
tional theory of sensation in which the systematic confusion

1 Prof. Moore, ‘Defence of Common Sense’, in Contemporary British
Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 221-2.

200 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

of sensation with imagination has, in spite of Hume’s pro-
test, become a dogma. The only way in which a sensum can
be present to us is by our sensing it; and if there is anything
which enables us to speak of ‘sensa’ not now being sensed,
this cannot be strictly sensation, and the sensa in question
cannot be strictly sensa. This is an obvious truth; but the
denial of it has become an orthodoxy; and we must expect
any statement of it to be greeted with blank stupefaction or
indignant accusations of paradox-mongering.

The error dates back to Locke. It is roundly stated on the
first page of his constructive argument ( Essay , book n, ch. i,
ad init .). ‘Let us suppose the Mind to be, as we say, White
Paper, void of all characters, without any Ideas ; how comes
it to be furnish’d ? How comes it by that vast store which
the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it with
an almost endless variety ?’ The answer is given by stating
the doctrine of ideas, with their two classes, ideas of sensation
and ideas of reflection. From the first source, our senses,
we have ideas of ‘ Yellow , White , Heat, Cold, Soft, Hard,
Bitter, Sweet, and all those which we call sensible Qualities’;
from the second, our ideas of * Perception , Thinking, Doubting,
Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different
Actings of our own Minds’. The origin he attributes to ‘the
idea of Yellow ’ would make it a sensum, an individual patch
of yellow which appears and is gone as soon as it has ap-
peared. The function he imposes on it would make it some-
thing very different; something recurrent and recognizable,
a permanent addition to our experience. Sensation ‘furnishes’
the mind with nothing whatever; it writes no legible char-
acters on any white paper within us. What sensation writes
is written in water. The task of building up furniture for the
mind out of sensa, which is the task Locke imposes on the
understanding, is like ordering a joiner to make furniture
for a room out of the shadows cast by the window-bars in
sunlight on the floor.

It was Hume who first perceived the problem, and tried
to solve it by distinguishing ideas from impressions. He

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 201

was right when he laid it down that the immediate concern
of thought is not with impressions but with ideas ; that it is
ideas, not impressions, that are associated with one another
and thus built up into the fabric of knowledge; and that
ideas, though ‘derived’ from impressions, are not mere
relics of them like an after-taste of onions or an after-image
of the sun (as Lockians like Condillac supposed), but some-
thing different in kind: different, if not in what he calls their
‘nature’, in the way in which they are related to the active
powers of the mind. But because he was not able, as we have
seen, to give a satisfactory account of this difference, we find
to-day that philosophers who attempt to follow him lose
sight of his partial but very real achievement; either identi-
fying the idea with a special kind of impression, like Con-
dillac, or denying the idea altogether, and reducing what
Hume called the relations between ideas to relations between
the words which we use when we talk about ideas . 1

The confusions which in the minds of most modern philo-
sophers beset the whole idea of sensation are thus so in-
veterate, in English thought at least, that it may seem hopeless
to demand a return to Hume and a serious attempt to clear
them up. Nevertheless, that is my programme.

1 Condillac, Traitd des Sensations , i. ii, § 6. ‘Mais l’odeur qu’elle [sc. the
hypothetical statue of his argument, endowed at this stage with the sense of
smell and no other faculties except what are involved in its exercising that
sense] sent ne lui echappe pas enticement, aussitot que le corps odoriferant
cesse d’agir sur son organe. . . . Voila la memoire.’ This is as much as to say
that when, on reaching land after a rough voyage, the after-effects of the
tossing I have experienced make me feel as if the land were heaving, my
memory that the sea was rough simply is this swaying sensation I now feel.
Cf. Semon’s account of ‘mnemic feelings’ ( Die mnemischen Empfindungen ,
1909). Such feelings are (to speak with Hume) impressions; a memory is
an idea; and the belief that memory can be described in such a way is an
example of identifying the idea with one kind of impression. The alternative
way of ignoring Hume is to merge the idea in the word by which we designate
it, and thus reduce what Hume calls relations between ideas to relations
between words. This is the doctrine of certain ‘logical positivists’, who
hold that the propositions which Hume describes as asserting relations
between ideas merely ‘record our determination to use symbols’ that is,
words ‘in a certain fashion’ (A. J. Ayer, Language , Truth, and Logic (1935),
P . 11).

202

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

§ 3. Impressions and Ideas

Modern philosophers, when they talk of sensation, sensa,
and the like are talking about at least two kinds of things
which they fail to distinguish. First, something which they
are really talking about sometimes, and profess to be talking
about always, when they use such language: ‘real’ colours
and the act of seeing them, sounds and the act of hearing
them, scents and the act of smelling them, and so forth.
Secondly, something very different, namely acts of imagining
and the ‘imaginary’ colours, sounds, scents, and so forth
which we imagine. It is the second class of things to which
they are referring whenever they talk about the sensa which
in certain circumstances we should perceive or should have
perceived; the sensa which we have perceived in the past;
the sensa which we expect to perceive in the future. 1 It is to
these they are referring whenever they talk about a family
or class or collection or manifold of sensa.

There must be a distinction between these two kinds of
things; for if there were not, the statements which are made
about relations between sensa, quite apart from the question
whether they are true or not, could not even be made; for
nobody could in that case even imagine himself to be com-
paring different sensa. The problems discussed by these
philosophers would not only be incapable of solution, they
could never have been raised. There must, in other words,
be a form of experience other than sensation, but closely
related to it; so closely as to be easily mistaken for it, but
different in that the colours, sounds, and so on which in this
experience we ‘perceive’ are retained in some way or other
before the mind, anticipated, recalled, although these same
colours and sounds, in their capacity as sensa, have ceased
to be seen and heard.

This other form of experience is what we ordinarily call
imagination; ordinarily, because its existence as a form of
experience different from sensation, yet closely akin to it,

1 I borrow the Humian term ‘perceive’ from Professor Moore.

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 203

is something with which we are all perfectly familiar and for
which we have this familiar name. How it is related to the
thing called imagination at the end of the last chapter re-
mains to be seen. For the present, we must cling to the
notion that something of the kind exists, and recollect that
its existence was a cardinal point in the philosophy of Hume.
It was in order to distinguish it from sensation that Hume
distinguished ideas from impressions; and it was his great
merit to have realized that what modern philosophers miscall
relations between sensa (that is, between what he calls
impressions) are relations not between impressions but be-
tween ideas. The place which Hume’s ideas inhabit is the
empty room of Locke, progressively furnished with what
‘the busy and boundless Fancy of man’ provides. And it is
imagination, not sensation, to which appeal is made when
empiricists appeal to ‘experience’.

§ 4. Attention

Thought, I said in chapter VIII, detects ‘relations between
sensa’; finds in this patch of colour a qualitative similarity
with others, and in virtue of that similarity calls this patch
red. But in order that we may detect resemblances or any
other relations between things, we must first identify each
of them : distinguish each as a thing by itself and appreciate
its qualities as those qualities we find it to possess, even
though as yet (not having determined their relations to
qualities found elsewhere) we are not in a position to name
them. Before I can say ‘This is red’ I must first have
appreciated the colour-quality which, because it is like
certain others, I thus call by the same name. This act of
appreciating something, just as it stands, before I can begin
to classify it, is what we call attending to it.

It may be objected that what I have called appreciating
the colour-quality of a red patch is the same as seeing it: in
other words, that what I am here calling attention to is noth-
ing but sensation itself. Before answering this objection, I
will begin by pointing out that looking is different from

204 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

seeing, and listening from hearing. Seeing and hearing are
species of sensation; looking and listening are the corre-
sponding species of attention.

I have followed the current tradition in quoting ‘a red
patch’ as an example of a sensum. But what presents itself
to our eyes, in so far as we merely see, is never a red patch.
•It is always a visual field, more or less parti-coloured; having
no definite edges, but fading into confusion and dimness
away from the focus of vision. A patch is a piece cut out of
this field, which presents itself to us only in so far as we
look at it. To describe it as a patch implies that the field is
divided into an object of attention, and a background or
penumbra from which attention is withdrawn.

Attention divides, but it does not abstract. We attend, for
example, only to this red patch out of all the variegated field
of vision; but what we attend to is the red patch as it
presents itself to us, a concrete individual. Similarly, we
may attend to the red patch as we see it, as distinct from the
emotion which we feel in seeing it. On the other hand, if we
abstract from it the quality of redness, a quality which can
be shared by other individual patches, we do so not by
attending but by thinking. The activity of thinking or
intellectual activity always presupposes the activity of atten-
tion, .not in the sense that it can only happen after it, but in
the sense that it rests upon it as upon a foundation. Atten-
tion is going on concurrently with intellection; an attention
combined with intellection, and modified by it in such way as
that combination requires.

Thus, when to the merely psychic experience of feeling
(purely sensuous-emotional experience) there is added the
activity of attention, the block of feeling present to the mind
is split in two. That part of it to which we pay attention is
called the ‘conscious’ part (properly speaking, it is not it
that is conscious, it is we that are conscious of it); the rest
is the ‘unconscious’ part. What is called ‘the unconscious’
is not the psychical level of experience as such, but the
negative counterpart or penumbra of that upon which atten-

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 205

tion is focused. This is relatively, not absolutely, uncon-
scious. It is not absent from attention; it is removed from
its focus, ignored. And obviously we cannot ignore a thing
unless we give it a certain degree and a peculiar kind of
attention.

At the merely psychical level, the distinction between
conscious and unconscious does not exist. To describe this
level as unconscious, therefore, is to describe it in terms of
an antithesis which does not apply to it, and thus to place it
in a false perspective. The mind here exists only in the shape
of sentience. What we are doing at this level is what
Descartes described as ‘using his senses’, or what Professor
Alexander calls ‘enjoying ourselves’. Descartes 1 calls this
the immediate experience of the union of the mind with the
body; Alexander regards it as a relation to ourselves which
is too intimate to be knowledge. We can never catch our-
selves thus engaged, to draw up an account of our employ-
ment. When the light of consciousness falls on such
occupations, they change their character; what was sentience
becomes imagination. Hence we cannot study psychical
experience, or even assure ourselves that it exists, by in-
quiring of our own consciousness; that can only tell us
clearly of the things to which it attends, and obscurely of
those which it ignores. Those which are utterly outside its
ken must be studied by other methods. But what are these
methods to be? Behaviourism has dealt with the problem,
and gone some way towards a correct solution, by dismissing
‘introspection’, that is, inquiry made of consciousness, as
futile, and identifying the psychical with the physiological.

1 ‘C’est en usant seulement de la vie et des conversations ordinaires, et en
s’abstenant de mediter et d’etudier aux choses qui exercent Timagination
[viz., mathematics], qu’on apprend k concevoir l’union de Time et du corps
... la principale r&gle que j’ai tou jours observee en mes etudes ... a ete que
je n’ai jamais employ^ que fort peu d’heures, par jour, aux pensees qui
occupent l’imagination [mathematics], et fort peu d’heures, par an, k celles
qui occupent l’entendement seul [metaphysics], et que j’ai donn£ tout le
reste de mon temps au relSche des sens et au repos de Tesprit. . . . C’est ce
qui m’a fait retirer aux champs.’ — Letter of 28 June 1643 to the Princess
Elisabeth.

4430

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206 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The method thus devised is perfectly sound, but for one
flaw. Unless we had independent knowledge both that there
is such a thing as psychical experience and what kind of a
thing it is, the problem which the behaviourist solves by his
method could never arise. This independent knowledge is
derived neither from observing bodily ‘behaviour’ nor from
questioning consciousness, but from analysing consciousness,
and thus discovering its relation to a more elementary kind
of experience which it presupposes.

The principle of this analysis depends on the fact that
attention (or, as we may now indifferently call it, conscious-
ness or awareness) has a double object where sentience has a
single. What we hear, for example, is merely sound. What
we attend to is two things at once : a sound, and our act of
hearing it. The act of sensation is not present to itself, but
it is present, together with its own sensum, to the act of
attention. This is, in fact, the special significance of the
con- in the word consciousness : it indicates the togetherness
of the two things, sensation and sensum, both of which are
present to the conscious mind. A man conscius sibi irae 1 is
not one who simply feels anger; he is one who is aware of the
anger as his own, and is aware of himself as feeling it. Thus,
the difference between seeing and looking, or hearing and
listening, is that a person who is said to be looking is de-
scribed as aware of his own seeing as well as of the thing he
sees. There is the same focusing on both sides. As in
looking I focus my attention on part of the visual field,
seeing the rest but seeing it ‘unconsciously’, so at the same
time I focus my attention on part of the multiform sensory
action which at the moment is the totality of my seeing, and
thus that part of it becomes a conscious seeing or looking,
the rest becomes ‘unconscious’ seeing.

§ 5. The Modification of Feeling by Consciousness

Colour, or anger, which is no longer merely seen or felt
but attended to, is still colour or anger. When we become
1 Suetonius, Claudius .

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 207

conscious of it, it is still the very same colour and the very
same anger. But the total experience of seeing or feeling
it has undergone a change, and in that change what we see
or feel is correspondingly changed. This is the change which
Hume describes by speaking of the difference between an
impression and an idea.

With the entry of consciousness into experience, a new
principle has established itself. Attention is focused upon
one thing to the exclusion of the rest. The mere fact that
something is present to sense does not give it a claim on
attention. Even what is most vividly present to sense can
do no more than solicit attention ; it cannot secure it. Thus,
the focus of attention is by no means necessarily identical
with the focus of vision. I can fix my eyes in one direction,
and my attention upon what lies at a considerable angle away
from it. I can deliberately refuse attention to the loudest of
the noises I am hearing, and concentrate upon a much less
conspicuous one. Often, no doubt, we idly allow our atten-
tion to be attracted by whatever is most prominent in sensa-
tion and emotion ; the brightest light, the loudest noise, the
pain or anger or fear that comes most strongly upon us ; but
there is no reason for this in principle, and it only happens
so long as our consciousness is a faint and confused one.

Thus attention is in no sense a response to stimulus. It
takes no orders from sensation. Consciousness, master in its
own house, dominates feeling. Now feeling as so dominated,
feeling as compelled to accept whatever place consciousness
gives it, focal or peripheral, in the field of attention, is no
longer impression, it is idea. Consciousness is absolutely
autonomous : its decision alone determines whether a given
sensum or emotion shall be attended to or not. A conscious
being is not thereby free to decide what feelings he shall
have; but he is free to decide what feeling he shall place in
the focus of his consciousness.

Yet he is not free to choose whether he shall exercise this
power of decision or not. In so far as he is conscious, he is
obliged to decide; for that decision is consciousness itself.

208 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Further: in so far as he is simply conscious, he does not
review his various feelings and then decide which of them he
shall attend to. Such a review would be a successive atten-
tion to these various feelings. In order to choose, in the strict
sense of that word, which feeling he shall attend to, he must
first have attended to them all. The freedom of consciousness
is thus not a freedom of choice between alternatives; that is
a further kind of freedom, which arises only when experience
reaches the level of intellect.

The freedom of mere consciousness is thus an elementary
kind of freedom; but it is a very real kind. At the level of
psychic experience, the self is dominated by its own feelings.
What Berkeley or Hume calls their ‘force’ or ‘liveliness’
consists in the fact of this dominance. A child feels pain and
screams; fear, and cringes; anger, and howls or bites; each
in perfectly automatic reaction to the emotion of the moment.
At the level of consciousness, the feelings are dominated by
the self that owns them. When the child becomes conscious,
he not only finds himself feeling in various ways, but attends
to some of these feelings and not to others. If he now
howls with rage, it is not because of the rage simply, but
because of his attending to it. The howl becomes a different
one, audibly different to an experienced ear: not the auto-
matic howl of sheer rage, but the self-conscious howl of a
child who, attending to his own rage, seems anxious to draw
the attention of others to it. As this consciousness of himself
becomes firmer and more habitual, he finds that he can
dominate the rage by the sheer act of attending to what he is
doing, and thus stop howling, master his feelings instead of
letting them master him.

The consciousness of self as something other than the
feeling of the moment, something to which that feeling
belongs, is thus the assertion of the self as able in principle to
dominate the feeling. Neither is a consequence of the other.
It is not because the child first becomes conscious of himself
that he then proceeds to act on that consciousness; it is not
because he first dominates his feelings that, reflecting on this

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 209

experience, he becomes aware of his own existence. The
theoretical and practical activities, self-consciousness and
self-assertion, form together a single indivisible experience.

The effect of this experience on the feelings themselves
is to make them less violent. They do not suffer alteration in
quality or diminution of intensity; but their violence, or
power of determining our actions (including our thoughts,
so far as we can be said to think at this primitive stage), is
abated. They are no longer like storms or earthquakes,
devastating our life. They become domesticated; real ex-
periences still, and experiences of the same kind as before;
but fitted into the fabric of our life instead of proceeding on
their own way regardless of its structure. True, we do not
yet conceive this as a structure of a definite kind, involving
certain ends to which our various acts must be subordinated;
that belongs to a later stage. But in asserting ourselves as
against our feelings we have asserted in principle a structure
of some kind, though as yet an indeterminate one. In be-
coming aware of myself I do not yet know at all what I am;
but I do know that I am something to which this feeling
belongs, not something belonging to it.

This domestication has a further result. We become able
to perpetuate feelings (including sensa) at will. Attending to
a feeling means holding it before the mind; rescuing it from
the flux of mere sensation, and conserving it for so long as
may be necessary in order that we should take note of it.
This, again, means perpetuating the act by which we feel it;
for a given sensum can appear only to the appropriate act,
and a sustained sensum implies ,a sustained act of sensation.
If the reference here had been to pure sensation, this language
would have been meaningless; but the reference is to sensa-
tion as modified by consciousness. We have already seen
how, in general, that modification works. The conscious
self is no longer dominated by its feelings; it can select and
isolate any one element contained in them, placing that
element in the focus of attention. Moreover, when this is

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2io IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

relatively to the self’s total experience not of impression but
of idea: it does not command, it obeys; it does not determine
the reaction of the self, it exemplifies the self’s mastery over
its own possessions.

If this is applied to the special case of sensa, we get the
following result. In the flux of sensations, one pattern of
the total sensory field is being replaced by another. Attention
now focuses itself on one element in that field: for example,
this scarlet patch. As I look, the red is actually fading; it is
being obscured by the superimposition of its own after-
image, which dulls the scarlet moment by moment. But by
attending to the scarlet and neglecting everything else I
create a kind of compensation for this fading. This pro-
gressive refocusing of attention is so familiar and habitual
a thing that we only with difficulty recognize it as going on.
It requires a certain effort to discover that every colour we
see begins to fade from the moment we begin to see it. By
thus adjusting our attention we do not make our organs of
sense work in a different way; we do not lift any sensa, as
such, out of their native flux; but we obtain a new kind of
experience by moving as it were with the flux, so that the
self and the object are (so to speak) at rest relatively to each
other for an appreciable time. What we have done is no
doubt very little; but that little is very important; we have
liberated ourselves for a moment from the flux of sensation
and kept something before us long enough to get a fair sight
of it. At the same time we have converted it from impression
into idea; we have become conscious of ourselves as its
masters, and broken its mastery over us. We have told it to
stay still, and it has stayed, though only for a moment.

A moment means a short space of time; but how short?
How far must the flux of sense have carried a sound or a
colour, before the attempt to compensate for its gradual
disappearance by the operation of consciousness must fail?
Obviously, no definite answer can be given. A fit of anger,
passing away, leaves a fading trace of itself in our actual
feeling, progressively swamped beneath feelings of other

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 21 1

kinds, for an indeterminable length of time. So long as any
such trace remains, attention may single it out and, by a
similar process, reconstitute the original feeling in the shape
of an idea. These traces last far longer than we are apt to
suppose; and it is probable that what we call remembering
an emotion is never anything but thus focusing our atten-
tion on the traces it has left in our present feeling. The
same is perhaps true of recalling a colour, or sound, or scent.
Memory, in this sense of a somewhat ambiguous word, is
perhaps only fresh attention to the traces of a sensuous-
emotional experience which has not yet entirely passed away.
This would explain why lapse of time makes it harder to
remember such experiences. Hume’s ‘idea of red which we
form in the dark’ becomes harder and harder to evoke,
according to the length of time since last we had an
impression of red, until at last we find ourselves unable to
evoke it at all.

This is the meaning which we can still attach to Hume’s
formula, that all ideas are derived from impressions, and
accept that formula as the statement of a truth which is not
invalidated by Hume’s misapplication of it to the case of
concepts.

§ 6. Consciousness and Imagination

We have still a long way to go before we can wholly
justify the brave language philosophers use about ‘sensa’.
They speak like men accustomed to call spirits from the
vasty deep, who feel sure that they will come. They are
not content with the longer or shorter perpetuation of im-
pression into idea, through the work of consciousness,
which I have attempted to describe in the preceding section.
They want not only to recall sensa which are vanishing, but
to envisage others which have never been present to them;
to know what sensa they would have in hypothetical condi-
tions, and what other people are having now. These
miracles can, no doubt, be done. But they are not done by

r\( rrttion'AndhAee! T'Katt o nnlw

212 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

so far as consciousness is developed into, or supplemented
by, intellect. The ‘experience’ to which these philosophers
appeal is so far from being merely sensuous that it depends
for its existence on fully developed thinking.

But that would take us beyond the subject of this book.
Our present business is to ask how the concept of imagination
expounded in this chapter is related to that which was put
forward in Chapter IX. The two things certainly appear
very different; and if both have been arrived at by analysing
Hume’s distinction between impression and idea, one
might conclude that, unless our analysis has been faulty,
Hume was confusing two quite different distinctions in one
and the same pair of terms. We have now to ask whether
that conclusion would be justified.

In the last chapter we understood the distinction between
impressions and ideas as equivalent to that between real and
imaginary sensa, and we decided that this meant the distinc-
tion between sensa interpreted by thought and sensa not so
interpreted. Here we have understood it as equivalent to the
distinction between sheer feeling and feeling as modified
by consciousness with the double result of dominating it
and perpetuating it.

Let us begin by considering the second discrepancy: that
between idea as a feeling not interpreted by thought, and
idea as a feeling perpetuated and dominated by consciousness.
Now, it has already been urged (see above, p. 203, § 4) that
the work of determining the relations between things must
depend on something prior to it, namely having these things
held before the mind in such a way that we can compare
them with one another, and so become able to see how they
resemble one another and so forth. We must know what
each is in itself before we can decide how they are related.
To know „what a given thing is in itself is not, of course,
the same as knowing what kind of a thing it is. To say of
what we see, ‘This is a patch of red’, is going far beyond
knowing what it is in itself: it is considering it in relation to
an established system of colours with established names. To

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 213

say ‘red here now’ is to go even farther, and consider it also
as located in a system of spatial and temporal relations with
other things. Our knowledge of what it is in itself, if we try
to express that in words, will be stated in some such phrase
as * this is what I see’, or, since to call my act one of seeing is
already to distinguish, 'this is how I feel’. This is the kind of
thing we must be able to say before we begin interpreting,
that is, discussing relations. And we become able to say this,
not through bare sensation, but through consciousness of
sensation. What makes us able to say it is that we have, by
the work of attention, at once selected and perpetuated some
element which we find in the field of sensation, and some
corresponding element in the sensory act.

The two accounts I have given of ‘imaginations’ or ‘ideas’
are thus not incompatible. For a feeling of which we have
become conscious is only one ready for interpretation, not
one we have begun to interpret. And conversely, an un-
interpreted feeling, if that means a feeling which is ready for .
interpretation, can only be a feeling of which we have become
conscious. The two accounts are not only compatible, they
are complementary, and must refer to the same thing.

With the first discrepancy, that between impression as
real sensum (i.e. sensum interpreted by thought) and im-
pression as sheer feeling, it is otherwise. We have in effect
distinguished three stages in the life of a feeling. (1) First,
as bare feeling, below the level of consciousness. (2)
Secondly, as a feeling of which we have become conscious.

(3) Thirdly, as a feeling which, in addition to becoming
conscious of it, we have placed in its relation to others.
Whether these three stages are sometimes or always separ-
ated in time, we need not ask. Their essential relation is not
temporal, but logical. Where A is logically presupposed by
B, A need not have existed by itself before B came into
existence; the logical relation may stand, even though they
came into existence at the same time.

Of these three stages, we have identified (2) as what Hume
means by idea. The two characteristics which appeared

214 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

discrepant, but which we have found to be compatible and
indeed correlative, are the relations in which (2) stands to
(1) and (3) respectively. The reason why they appeared
contradictory was that we had not yet distinguished between
(1) and (3). In the preceding chapter, we ended by inter-
preting the word ‘impression’ in sense (3); in this chapter,
we have interpreted it in sense (1). The truth is that Hume
does not distinguish the two meanings. An impression, for
him, is distinguished from an idea only by its force or
liveliness; but this force may be of two kinds. It may be the
brute violence of crude sensation, as yet undominated by
thought. Or it may be the solid strength of a sensum
firmly placed in its context by the interpretative work of
thought. Hume did not recognize the difference; and his
failure has been a damnosa hereditas for all subsequent philo-
sophy, at least for those philosophies which stand on the
empiricist wing of our tradition. For such philosophies it
has become a commonplace that the world we know is
somehow constructed out of sense-data, and that our state-
ments about it are in the first instance based upon experience,
and subsequently verified- by reference to the same; where
experience is taken to mean a store or supply of something
called sense-data. We saw that in the current use of this
and kindred words Hume’s distinction between impressions
and ideas had been ignored with disastrous results. At the
beginning of the present section we have seen something
further: namely, that the word is actually applied, not only
to both (1) and (2), but also and frequently to (3). The word
sense-datum or sensum is applied not only to something
given by sensation, in which case it would at once be taken
away again ; not only to something perpetuated by conscious-
ness or imagination, in which case the only region from
which it could be called up would be that of past sensation;
but to something constructed inferentially by the work of
intellect. If all these three things are habitually confused,
part of the blame, unless my reading of him is at fault, must
lie with Hume.

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

ax 5

§ 7. Consciousness and Truth

The activity of consciousness, we have seen, converts
impression into idea, that is, crude sensation into imagination.
Regarded as names for a certain kind or level of experience,
the words consciousness and imagination are synonymous:
they stand for the same thing, namely, the love! of experience
at which this conversion occurs. But within a single experi-
ence of this kind there is a distinction between that which
effects the conversion and that which has undergone it.
Consciousness is the first of these, imagination is the second.
Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when
transformed by the activity of consciousness.

This makes good the suggestion thrown out at the end of
Chapter VIII, that imagination is a distinct level of experi-
ence intermediate between sensation and intellect, the point
at which the life of thought makes contact with the life of
purely psychical experience. As we should now restate that
suggestion : it is not sensa as such that provide the data for
intellect, it is sensa transformed into ideas of imagination by
the work of consciousness.

In Chapter VIII, I gave a preliminary account of the
structure of experience based on a two-term distinction
between feeling and thought. I now seem to have retracted
this and substituted a three-term distinction in which con-
sciousness appears as an intermediate level of experience
connecting the two. But that is not my intention. Conscious-
ness is not something other than thought; it is thought
itself; but it is a level of thought which is not yet intellect.
What I was describing under the name of thought in Chapter
VIII was, we can now see, not thought in the widest sense,
which includes consciousness, but thought in a narrower
sense, thought far excellence , or intellection. Everything
which was said about thought, however, in the first section of
that chapter applies not only to intellection but to thought
generally and therefore to consciousness. The aim of this
section is to develoD this Doint.

2i6 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The work of intellect is to apprehend or construct rela-
tions. This work, as I explained in Chapter VIII, takes two
shapes, one primary and the other secondary. Intellect in
its primary function apprehends relations between terms
which in Chapter VIII were called feelings; but we now
know that this was inaccurate; they are not the crude feelings
of purely psychical experience which I am now calling
impressions, they are these feelings as modified by conscious-
ness and so converted into ideas. Intellect in its secondary
function apprehends relations between acts of primary
intellection or between what in such acts we think.

Consciousness is the activity of thought without which we
should have no terms between which intellect in its primary
form could detect or construct relations. Thus consciousness
is thought in its absolutely fundamental and original shape.

As thought, it must have that bipolarity which belongs to
thought as such. It is an activity which may be well or ill
done; what it thinks may be true or false. But this seems
paradoxical; for since it is not concerned with the relations
between things, and hence does not think in terms of concepts
or generalizations, it cannot err, as intellect can, by referring
things to the wrong concepts. It cannot, for instance, think
‘This is a dog’, when the object before it is a cat. If, as we
said above, the kind of phrase which expresses what it thinks
is something like ‘This is how I feel’, such a statement might
seem incapable of being false, in which case consciousness
would have the peculiar privilege of being a kind of thought
not liable to error, and this would amount to saying that it
was not a kind of thought at all.

But the statement ‘This is how I feel’ does imply bipola-
rity. It has an opposite: ‘This is not how I feel’; and to
assert it is to deny this opposite. Even if consciousness
never actually erred, it would still have this in common with
all forms of thought, that it lives by rejecting error. A true
consciousness is the confession to ourselves of our feelings;
a false consciousness would be disowning them, i.e. thinking
about one of them ‘That feeling is not mine’.

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 217

The possibility of such disowning is already implicit in
the division of sensuous-emotional experience into what is
attended to and what is not attended to, and the recognition
of the former as ‘mine’. If a given feeling is thus recognized,
it is converted from impression into idea, and thus dominated
or domesticated by consciousness. If it is not recognized, it
is simply relegated to the other side of the dividing line : left
unattended to, or ignored. But there is a third alternative. The
recognition may take place abortively. It may be attempted,
but prove a failure. It is as if we should bring a wild animal
indoors, hoping to domesticate it, and then, when it bites,
lose our nerve and let go. Instead of becoming a friend, what
we have brought into the house has become an enemy.

I must try to pay cash for the paper money of that simile.
First, we direct our attention towards a certain feeling, or
become conscious of it. Then we take fright at what we have
recognized: not because the feeling, as an impression, is an
alarming impression, but because the idea into which we are
converting it proves an alarming idea. We cannot see our
way to dominate it, and shrink from persevering in the
attempt. We therefore give it up, and turn our attention to
something less intimidating.

I call this the ‘corruption’ of consciousness; because con-
sciousness permits itself to be bribed or corrupted in the
discharge of its function, being distracted from a formidable
task towards an easier one. So far from being a bare possi-
bility, it is an extremely common fact. Let us return to the
case of a child who, after howling automatically from mere
rage, becomes conscious of himself and recognizes the rage
as a feeling of his own. This new state of things, if properly
developed, makes him able to dominate the rage. But if all
that is desired is to escape being dominated by it, there are
two ways in which this may come about. The nettle may be
either dodged or grasped. In the first case, we avoid the
domination of one feeling by attending to a different feeling.
The child’s attention is distracted from his rage, and the
howls cease. In the second, we avoid being dominated by

218 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

fixing our attention on the very feeling which threatens to

dominate us, and so learn to dominate it.

The feeling from which attention is distracted, whether
by a foolish parent or nurse or by our own self-mismanage-
ment, does not lapse from attention altogether. Conscious-
ness does not ignore it; it disowns it. Very soon we learn to
bolster up this self-deceit by attributing the disowned ex-
perience to other people. Coming down to breakfast out of
temper, but refusing to allow that the ill humour so evident
in the atmosphere is our own, we are distressed to find the
whole family suffering agonies of crossness.

The bipolarity which belongs to consciousness as a form
of thought, infects the imaginations which it constructs.
When consciousness is corrupted, imagination shares the
corruption. In the mere imagining of something, whatever
it may be, this corruption cannot exist. An imagination is
merely an element in my sensuous-emotional experience
upon which I fix my attention, and thus stabilize and per-
petuate it as an idea. There can be no element in my ex-
perience which has not a right to be so treated, and hence
imagination as such can never be corrupt. But whenever
some element in experience is disowned by consciousness,
that other element upon which attention is fixed, and which
consciousness claims as its own, becomes a sham. In itself,
it does genuinely belong to the consciousness that claims it;
in saying ‘This is how I feel’, consciousness is telling the
truth; but the disowned element, with its corresponding
statement ‘And that is how I do not feel’, infects this truth
with error. The picture which consciousness has painted of
its own experience is not only a selected picture (that is, a
true one so far as it goes), it is a bowdlerized picture, or one
whose omissions are falsifications.

This corruption of consciousness has already been de-
scribed by psychologists in their own way. The disowning
of experiences they call repression; the ascription of these
to other persons, projection; their consolidation into a mass
of experience, homogeneous in itself (as it well may be, if the

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 219

disowning is systematically done), dissociation; and the
building-up of a bowdlerized experience which we will
admit to be our own, fantasy-building. They have shown,
too, the disastrous effect which these corruptions of con-
sciousness have, if they become habitual, on the person
suffering from them. The same lesson was taught long ago
by Spinoza, who has expounded better than any other man
the conception of the truthful consciousness and its impor-
tance as a foundation for a healthy mental life. The problem
of ethics, for him, is the question how man, being ridden by
feelings, can so master them that his life, from being a
continuous passio , an undergoing of things, can become
a continuous actio, or doing of things. The answer he gives
is a curiously simple one. ‘Affectus qui passio est, desinit
esse passio, simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus
ideam’ {Ethics, part v, prop. 3). As soon as we form a clear
and distinct idea of a passion, it ceases to be a passion.

The untruth of a corrupt consciousness belongs to neither
of the commonly recognized species of untruth. We divide
untruths into two kinds, errors and lies. When experience
reaches the intellectual level, the distinction is valid. Con-
cealment of the truth is one thing, a bona fide mistake is
another. But at the level of consciousness the distinction
between these two things does not exist: what exists is the
protoplasm of untruth out of which, when further developed,
they are to grow. The untruthful consciousness, in disown-
ing certain features of its own experience, is not making
a bona fide mistake, for its faith is not good; it is shirking
something which its business is to face. But it is not con-
cealing the truth, for there is no truth which it knows
and is concealing. Paradoxically, we may say that it is
deceiving itself; but this is only a clumsy attempt to explain
what is happening within a single consciousness on the
analogy of what may happen as between one intellect and
another. 1

1 The untruthful consciousness is, I suppose, what Plato means in the
phrase which is unhappily translated ‘the lie in the soul* (Republic, 382 a-c).

I

230 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The condition of a corrupt consciousness is not only an
example of untruth, it is an example of evil. The detailed
tracing of particular evils to this source by psycho-analysts
is one of the most remarkable and valuable lines of investiga-
tion initiated by modern science, bearing the same relation
to the general principles of mental hygiene laid down by
Spinoza that the detailed inquiries of relativistic physics
bear to the project for a ‘universal science’ of mathematical
physics as laid down by Descartes.

Now, just as we divide untruths into errors and lies, so we
divide evils into those a man suffers and those he does.
Where they affect not his relation to his surroundings but
his own condition, whether bodily or mental, this division
becomes one between disease and wrongdoing.

The symptoms and consequences of a corrupt conscious-
ness come under neither of these headings. They are not
exactly crimes or vices, because their victim does not choose
to involve himself in them, and cannot escape from them by
deciding to amend his conduct. They are not exactly
diseases, because they are due not to functional disorder or
to the impact of hostile forces upon the sufferer, but to his
own self-mismanagement. As compared with disease, they
are more like vice; as compared with vice, they are more like
disease.

The truth is that they are a kind of sheer or undifferentiated
evil, evil in itself, as yet undifferentiated into evil suffered
or misfortune and evil done or wickedness. The question
whether a man in whom they exist suffers through his mis-
fortune or through his fault is a question that does not arise.
He is in a worse state than either of these alternatives would
imply; for an unfortunate man may still have integrity of
character, and a wicked man may still be fortunate. A man
whose consciousness is corrupt has no mitigations, either
within or without. So far as that corruption masters him, he
is a lost soul, concerning whom hell is no fable. And
whether or no the psycho-analysts have found the means to
rescue him, or to save those in whom this evil has advanced

221

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS
less far, their attempt to do so is an enterprise that has
already won a great place in the history of man’s warfare
with the powers of darkness.

§ 8. - Summary

We have now reached a point where the results of the
argument can be summarized into a general theory of imagi-
nation. All thought presupposes feeling; and all the proposi-
tions which express the results of our thought belong to one
of two types: they are either statements about feelings, in
which case they are called empirical, or statements about the
procedure of thought itself, in which case they are called
a ■priori. ‘Thought’, here, means intellect; ‘feeling’ means
not feeling proper, but imagination.

Feeling proper, or psychical experience, has a double
character: it is sensation and emotion. We may attend
chiefly or exclusively to one or the other aspect, but in the
experience of feeling as it actually comes to us the two are
firmly united. Every feeling is both sensuous and emotional.
Now, feeling proper is an experience in which what we now feel
monopolizes the whole field of our view. What we have felt
in the past, or shall feel in the future, or might feel on a
different kind of occasion, is not present to us at all, and has
no meaning for us. Actually, of course, these things have a
meaning for us, and we can form some idea of them, some-
times no doubt a fairly correct one; but that is because we
are able to do other things besides merely feeling.

If I assert any relation between what I feel now and what
I have felt in the past, or what I should expect to feel in
different circumstances, my assertion cannot be based on
mere feeling; for mere feeling, even if it can tell me what
I now feel, cannot acquaint me with the other term of the
relation. Hence the so-called sense-data which are described
as organized into families or the like are not feelings as they
actually come to us, sensa with their own emotional charges;
they are not even the sensuous element in these feelings
sterilized of its emotional charge; they are something quite

I

I

222 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

different. But further: mere feeling cannot even tell me
what I now feel. If I try to fasten my attention on this
present feeling, so as to give myself some account of its
character, it has already changed before I can do so. If, to
take the other alternative, I succeed in doing so (and it is
clear that we do succeed, otherwise we could never know
the things about feeling which have already been stated), the
feeling to which I attend must be somehow stabilized or
perpetuated in order that I may study it, which means that
it must cease to be mere feeling and enter upon a new stage
of its existence.

This new stage is reached not by some process antecedent
to the act of attention, but by that act itself. Attention or
awareness is a kind of activity different from mere feeling,
and presupposing it. The essence of it is that instead of
having our field of view wholly occupied by the sensations
and emotions of the moment, we also become aware of
ourselves, as the activity of feeling these things. Theoretically
considered, this new activity is an enlargement of our field
of view, which now takes in the act of feeling as well as
the thing felt. Practically considered, it is the assertion of
ourselves as the owners of our feelings. By this self-assertion
we dominate our feelings : they become no longer experiences
forcing themselves upon us unawares, but experiences in
which we experience our own activity. Their brute power
over us is thus replaced by our power over them : we become
able on the one hand to stand up to them so that they no
longer unconditionally determine our conduct, and, on the
other, to prolong and evoke them at will. From being
impressions of sense, they thus become ideas of imagination.

In this new capacity, as losing their power over us and
becoming subject to our will, they are still feelings, and
feelings of the same kind as before; but they have ceased to
be mere sensations and have become what we call imagina-
tions. From one point of view, imagination does not differ from
sensation: what we imagine is the very same kinds of things
(colours, &c.) which present themselves to us in mere

IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS 223

sensation. From another point of view, it is very different
through being, in the way above described, tamed or
domesticated. That which tames it is the activity of con-
sciousness, and this is a kind of thought.

Specifically, it is the kind of thought which stands closest
to sensation or mere feeling. Every further development of
thought is based upon it, and deals not with feeling in its
crude form but with feeling as thus transformed into imagina-
tion . 1 In order to consider likenesses and differences between
feelings, classify them or group them in other kinds of
arrangement than classes, envisage them as arranged in a
time-series, and so forth, it is necessary first that each one
of the feelings thus reflected upon should be attended to and
held before the mind as something with a character of its
own; and this converts it into imagination.

Consciousness itself does not do any of these things. It
only prepares the ground for them. In itself, it does nothing
but attend to some feeling which I have here and now. In
attending to a present feeling, it perpetuates that feeling,
though at the cost of turning it into something new, no
longer sheer or crude feeling (impression) but domesticated
feeling or imagination (idea). But it does not compare one
idea with another. If, while I am thus enjoying one idea,
I proceed to summon up another, the new idea is not held
alongside the old, as two distinct experiences, between which
I can detect relations. The two ideas fuse into one, the new
one presenting itself as a peculiar colouring or modification
of the old. Thus imagination resembles feeling in this, that
its object is never a plurality of terms with relations between
them, but a single indivisible unity: a sheer here-and-now.

1 Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 78, B 103 (tr. N. K. Smith, p. 112),
where imagination is described as a ‘blind but indispensable function’ inter-
mediate between sensation (which means the activity correlative to sensa
proper, not to the idealized ‘sense-data* of modern empiricism) and under-
standing. This is the Humian doctrine that knowledge is concerned with ideas,
not impressions; but Kant did not develop the notion he here suggested, except
in the highly important (and for the same reason commonly misunderstood)

rhfl’nfrr rvn thf* nf 1-Vi^ r’af-panrip**

224 IMAGINATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The conceptions of past, future, the possible, the hypo-
thetical, are as meaningless for imagination as they are for
feeling itself. They are conceptions which appear only with
a further development of thought.

When, therefore, it is said that imagination can summon
up feelings at will, this does not mean that when I imagine
I first form some idea of a feeling and then, as it were,
summon it into my presence as a real feeling; still less, that
I can review in fancy the various feelings which I might
enjoy, and choose to evoke in myself the one which I prefer.
To form an idea of a feeling is already to feel it in imagination.
Thus imagination is ‘blind’, i.e. cannot anticipate its own
results by conceiving them as purposes in advance of execut-
ing them. The freedom which it enjoys is not the freedom to
carry out a plan, or to choose between alternative possible
plans. These are developments belonging to a later stage.

To the same later stage belongs the distinction between
truth and error, regarded as the distinction between true and
false accounts of the relations between things. But there is
a special way in which that distinction applies to conscious-
ness, and therefore to imagination. Consciousness can never
attend to more than a part of the total sensuous-emotional
field; but either it may recognize this as belonging to itself,
or it may refuse so to recognize it. In the latter case, certain
feelings are not ignored, they are disowned; the conscious
self disclaims responsibility for them, and thus tries to
escape being dominated by them without the trouble of
dominating them. This is the ‘corrupt consciousness’,
which is the source of what psychologists call repression.
Its imaginations share in its corruption ; they are ‘fantasies’,
sentimentalized or bowdlerized pictures of experience,
Spinoza’s ‘inadequate ideas of affections’ ; and the mind that
takes refuge in them from the facts of experience delivers
itself into the power of the feelings it has refused to face.

XI

LANGUAGE
§ i . Symbol and Expression

Language comes into existence with imagination, as a feature
of experience at the conscious level. It is here that it receives
its original characteristics, which it never altogether loses,
however much it is modified (a process we shall have to
examine later on) in adapting itself to the requirements of the
intellect.

In its original or native state, language is imaginative
or expressive: to call it imaginative is to describe what it
is, to call it expressive is to describe what it does. It is an
imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion.
Intellectual language is this same thing intellectualized, or
modified so as to express thought. I shall try to show in the
sequel that the expression of any given thought is effected
through the expression of the emotion accompanying it.

The distinction between these two functions of language
has been stated in a good many ways which need not be
enumerated. 1 One way of putting it is to distinguish language
proper from symbolism. A symbol (as the Greek word
indicates) is something arrived at by agreement and accepted
by the parties to the agreement as valid for a certain pur-
pose. This is a fair account of how the words in an intellec-
tualized language come by their meanings, so far as they are
thoroughly intellectualized, which in fact is seldom very far;
but it cannot be a true account of language as such, for the
supposed agreement by which the meaning of a given word is
settled implies a previous discussion out of which the agree-
ment is arrived at; and unless language already exists and is
already capable of stating the point at issue the discussion
cannot arise.

1 Dr. Richards’s distinction between ‘the scientific use of language’ and
‘the emotive use of laneuase’ is considered below, in $ 8.

aa6 LANGUAGE

Symbolism or intellectualized language thus presupposes
imaginative language or language proper. There must,
therefore, be a corresponding relation between the theories
of the two. But in the traditional theory of language these
relations are reversed, with disastrous results. Language as
such is identified with symbolism; and if its expressive
function is not altogether overlooked an attempt is made to
explain it as a secondary function somehow arrived at by
modifying the symbolic function. When Hobbes ( Leviathan ,
i. iv) says that the primary use of speech is for ‘acquisition of
science’, for which purpose ‘the right definition of names’
is the first requisite, clearly, he is identifying language in
general with intellectualized language or symbolism. Locke,
in defining a word as a sound which is made the sign of an
idea (Essay, hi. i, § 3), is less explicit in his statement of the
error; but none the less, on the whole, he takes it for granted.
Berkeley, though in general he takes the same view, recog-
nizes a second use of words, ‘to wit, the influencing of our
conduct and actions; which may be done either by forming
rules for us to act by, or by raising certain passions, disposi-
tions, and emotions in our minds’ (Alciphron, vii; Works , ed.
Fraser, ii. 327). The distinction is important; but this
second usage is still an intellectualized use, in so far as the
activity of finding means to a given end (the influencing
of some one’s conduct, &c.) is an intellectual activity. To
use language as a means for raising a certain passion in
another is not the same thing as using it to express one’s own.

To-day it is almost an orthodoxy that language as such
is symbolic in the above sense of the word. If that is so,
certain results follow. Every symbol, for the sake of accuracy
in usage, ought to be used in a single invariable sense, and
defined with precision. Consequently, if we are to use
language well, every word should be thus used and thus
defined. If this is found impracticable (and it always will be
found impracticable) the inference is that ‘ordinary’ languages
are ill designed for their purpose, and ought to be replaced
for the expression of accurate thinking by a scientifically

LANGUAGE 227

planned ‘philosophical language’. Another consequence is
that just as every one, before he can begin to use a symbol
in mathematics or the like, must be told what it means, so
in a child’s original acquisition of his mother tongue every
word he is to use must first be explained to him; and it is
actually supposed that this comes about by its mother, or
other instructor, pointing to the fire and saying ‘fire’, giving
it milk and saying ‘milk’, touching its toe and saying ‘toe’,
and so forth. When the fact comes out that when a mother
points to the fire she probably says ‘pretty’, when giving it
milk, ‘nice’, and when touching its toe, ‘this little pig went
to market’, the conclusion can only be expressed in the
words of a (possibly mythical) schoolmaster: ‘parents are the
last people in the world who ought to be allowed to have
children.’

The reason why no mother teaches language in this way
is that it could not possibly be done ; for the supposed gestures
of pointing and so forth are themselves in the nature of
a language. Either the child has first to be taught this
language of gestures, in order to help it in learning English,
or it must be supposed to ‘tumble to’ the gesture language
for itself. But if it can do that, we want to know how it does
it, when a cat cannot (for you can never teach a cat what you
mean by pointing), and, if so, why it cannot (as in fact it does)
‘tumble’ in the same way to English.

Actually, if the linguistic theorist can obtain access to a
nursery, he will find something very different going on. He
will hear the mother not enunciating single words to her
child, but pouring out a flood of talk mostly devoted not to
the naming of certain things but to the expression of her
pleasure in its society; the child replies with gurglings and
cooings; as time goes on, these become more articulate,
and sooner or later the child is heard imitating in a garbled
form phrases which it has heard on certain kinds of occa-
sion, when new occasions arise which seem to call for them.
Its mother may have been in the habit of saying in her baby-
talk. when removinpr its bonnet. ‘Hattv off!’: and. if so.

228 LANGUAGE

when it takes its own bonnet off and throws it out of the
perambulator it will say in tones of great satisfaction,
‘Hattiaw 1*

Now, the sound ‘hattiaw’ is not a symbol. The mother
and child have not agreed between themselves that it shall
mean ‘removal of hat’. The child regards it as a noise made
when one takes a hat off. Hearing its mother make that noise
goes with having her remove its hat; and consequently
making that noise for itself goes with removing the hat for
itself. The relation between making the noise and removing
the hat has for it no resemblance whatever to the relation (of
which it has yet no conception) between the symbol + and
the act of adding two numbers. Still less, of course, does it
conceive the sound as a combination of two symbols, one
signifying a hat and the other removal. Unhatting itself is
a single act, and the sound which one makes in performing
it is a single sound. Phonetic analysis of the sound into a
number of consonants and vowels, or grammatical analysis
of it into a number of words, is as far beyond the child as
anatomical analysis of the act into a number of muscular
movements.

It would be nearer the truth, in denying that ‘hattiaw*
is a symbol, to call it an expression. It does not express the
act of removing the hat, but it expresses the peculiar satis-
faction which for some reason the child takes in removing
it. That is to say, it expresses the feeling which it has in
doing that act. More strictly, it is not the sound ‘hattiaw’,
but the act of making this sound, that is expressive. To say
that one act expresses another act would be to talk nonsense;
to say that it expresses a feeling certainly means something.
We must try to determine what it means.

§ 2. Psychical Expression

In order to do this, we must begin by observing that
linguistic expression is not the only kind of expression, and
not the most primitive kind. There is another kind, which
unlike linguistic expression occurs independently of con-

LANGUAGE 229

sciousness and is a feature of experience at its purely psychical
level. This I shall call psychical expression.

It consists in the doing of involuntary and perhaps even
wholly unconscious bodily acts, related in a peculiar way to
the emotions they are said to express. Thus, certain dis-
tortions of the face express pain; a slackening of muscles
and a cold pallor of the skin express fear; and so forth. In
these cases, we feel the emotion expressed and also feel the
bodily act, or complex of acts, expressing it. The relation
between these, to which we refer when we say that the act
expresses the emotion, is of course a relation of necessary
connexion, and asymmetrical: we grimace ‘because’ we
feel pain, not vice versa. But the word ‘because’ is used to
indicate any kind of dependence, and does not distinguish
one kind from another.

The connexion is in one way like that between a sensum
and its emotional charge, namely, in the fact of its immediacy ;
the two things connected are not two distinct experiences,
but are elements in one indivisible experience. The sensum
of muscular tension, when one’s face is screwed up with pain,
is as intimately connected with the pain as the sensum of
scarlet which terrified a child, in our earlier example, with
the terror it produced. But though the two cases are alike
in the intimacy of the union between their elements, the
structural order of the elements is different, and indeed
opposite. The terror is the emotional charge of the colour,
and the colour sensum is logically (though not temporally)
prior to it. The pain is not the emotional charge of the
tension in the facial muscles; the sensum is here not prior
but posterior to the emotion.

The two cases have, in fact, been incompletely described.
In the first, we have omitted the original sensum (for
example, an intestinal gripe); in the second, we have omitted
the expression of the child’s terror, a complex reaction which
may be described as cringing. These omissions once made
good, the two cases are parallel; and we get an analysis
which, by recognizing the element of psychical expression,

230 LANGUAGE

supplements the account of the frightened child given in

Chapter VIII.

We have now (i) a sensum of scarlet (or rather, a visual
field containing that colour), (2) terror as the emotional
charge on that field, (3) the cringing which expresses that
terror. In the other case we have (1) the abdominal gripe as
a sensum (or rather, a field of organic sensation containing
that visceral sensum), (2) the pain which is the emotional
charge upon it, (3) the grimace expressing that pain. Each
case is one single experience, in which analysis reveals three
elements in a definite structural order.

Every kind and shade of emotion which occurs at the
purely psychical level of experience has its counterpart in
some change of the muscular or circulatory or glandular 1
system which, in the sense of the word now under discussion,
expresses it. Whether these changes are observed and
correctly interpreted depends on the skill of the observer.
So far as we can see, nothing but lack of this skill prevents
us from reading like an open book the psychical emotions
of every one with whom we have to do. But observing and
interpreting is an intellectual process; and this is not the
only way in which psychical expression conveys a meaning.
There is a kind of emotional contagion which takes effect
without any intellectual activity; without the presence even
of consciousness. This is a familiar fact, alarming because
it seems so inexplicable, in man. The spread of panic through
a crowd is not due to each person’s being independently
frightened, nor to any communication by speech; it happens
in the complete absence of these things, each person be-
coming terrified simply because his neighbour is terrified.
The psychical expression of fear in one person appears to
another as a complex of sensa immediately charged with
terror. Fear is not the only emotion that is thus contagious;

1 Not the endocrine system only. Even men, whose sense of smell is so
feeble, can discover that certain emotions in their fellow men occasion peculiar
scents by causing glandular discharges. To an animal whose sense of smell
is so acute as a dog’s, I suppose there is a ‘language* of scent as expressive as
the ‘language’ of involuntary facial gesture is to us.

language 231

the same thing happens with any emotion belonging to the
level of psychical experience. Thus the mere sight of some
one in pain, or the sound of his groans, produces in us an echo
of his pain, whose expression in our own body we can feel
in the tingling or shrinking of skin areas, certain visceral
sensa, and so forth.

This ‘sympathy’ (the simplest and best name for the
contagion I have' described) exists visibly among animals
other than man, and between animals of different species;
notably, for example, between man and his domestic
animals. A dog will snap at a man because it is afraid of
him; and the best way to make a dog bite you is to feel
frightened of it. However successfully you think you are
concealing your nervousness, the dog feels it; or rather he
feels the nervousness in himself which he has thus caught
from you. The same relation exists between men and wild
animals.

How this contagion ‘takes’ will depend, of course, on the
psychical structure of the mind that takes it. Terror in a
rabbit will communicate itself to a pursuing dog not as
terror but as a desire to kill, for a dog has the psychical
‘nature’ of a hunting animal. Every one knows that dogs
chase cats because cats run away; the cat’s exhibition of fear
produces in the dog, not an argument running thus : ‘this
cat is afraid of me; it evidently thinks I can kill it, so I
suppose I can; here goes’, but an immediate response in the
shape of aggressive emotion.

Psychical expression is the only expression of which
psychical emotions are capable (they can only be expressed
otherwise by being themselves transformed through the
activity of consciousness from impressions into ideas, as we
shall see in the next section); but psychical emotions are not
the only ones that can be psychically expressed. There is
a certain group of emotions which arise only through the
consciousness of self. Hatred, love, anger, and shame may
be taken as examples. Hatred is a feeling of antagonism;
it is an attitude towards something which we regard as

I

232 LANGUAGE

thwarting our own desires, or inflicting pain upon us, 1 and
this presupposes awareness of ourselves. Love is a feeling
towards something with which we feel our own existence to
be bound up, so that a benefit or injury to it is a benefit or
injury to ourselves. Anger, though unlike hate it does not
involve the idea of any particular thing or person that angers
us, is like it in being a consciousness of ourselves as baulked
or opposed. Shame is the consciousness of our own weakness
or ineffectiveness.

These ‘emotions of consciousness’, unlike the purely
psychical emotions, admit of expression in language: in a
phrase, a controlled gesture, or the like. But they also have
their own special psychical expressions, for example, the
blush of shame, accompanied by muscular relaxation; or
the flush of anger with muscular tension and rigidity. Now,
a psychical emotion is the emotional charge on a sensum;
but an emotion of consciousness is the emotional charge not
on a sensum but on a certain mode of consciousness. Hence,
if we ask ‘What is the sensum upon which shame is the emo-
tional charge ?’ and find (quite correctly) that no sensum is
present except those of hot skin and relaxed muscles, we may
reject the common-sense view that we blush because we
are ashamed, and propound the startling discovery that we are
ashamed because we blush. But all we have done is to beget
a paradox on a misunderstanding. To the series (1) scarlet
colour, (2) fear, (3) cringing, in the case of psychical emo-
tions, the corresponding series in an emotion of conscious-
ness is (x) consciousness of our own inferiority (which is not
a sensum but a mode of consciousness), (2) shame, (3)
blushing. The common-sense view is right, and the James-
Lange theory wrong.

Why should emotions of consciousness be thus expressible
in two quite different ways ? The answer lies in the relation
between any one level of experience and the next above it.
The higher level differs from the lower in having a new

1 ‘Odium est tristitia (sc. transitus a maioread minorem perfectionem) con-
comitante idea causae externae.’ Spinoza, Ethics, in, Jffectuurn definitions ,vii.

LANGUAGE 233

principle of organization; this does not supersede the old,
it is superimposed on it. The lower type of experience is
perpetuated in the higher type in a way somewhat like
(though not identical with) the way in which a pre-existing
matter is perpetuated when a new form is imposed on it.
We shall avail ourselves of this resemblance and use it
metaphorically as a description. In this metaphorical sense
of the words, any new and higher level of experience can be
described in either of two ways. Formally, it is something
quite new and unique, capable of being described only in
terms of itself. Materially, it is only a peculiar combination
of elements already existing at the lower level, and suscep-
tible of description in terms of these lower elements. Con-
sciousness (to apply this distinction) is formally unique,
altogether unlike anything that can be found in merely
psychical experience. Materially, it is only a certain new
arrangement of psychical experiences. A mode of conscious-
ness like shame is thus, formally, a mode of consciousness
and nothing else; materially, it is a constellation or synthesis
of psychical experiences.

The two ways in which it can be expressed correspond
with these two sides of its nature. But when it is called a
constellation or synthesis, this does not mean that there is
a putting together of elements which first existed separately,
and that the new quality of consciousness (in this case,
shame) was a mere resultant ‘emerging’ from that combina-
tion. Had that been the case, the James-Lange theory would
never have been invented; for we could easily have identified
the various sensa upon which, as thus combined, shame is
the emotional charge. The fact that this cannot be done is
experimental proof that the ‘emergence’ theory is, in this
case at least, mistaken; and that so far from consciousness
being merely a new pattern-quality emerging from a particular
way of combining psychical experiences, it is an activity by
which those elements are combined in this particular way.

One other aspect of this dual expressiveness may be
mentioned. If experience is really organized into different

234 LANGUAGE

levels so that each provides for the next a matter upon
which new form is to be imposed, each level must organize
itself according to its own principles before a transition can
be made to the next; for until that has been done, the raw
material needed for the creation of the next is not forth-
coming. Emotions of consciousness can be expressed, we
have seen, in two ways: formally, as modes of consciousness;
materially, as constellations of psychic elements. If the
level of consciousness is a level beyond which there lies
another, namely the level of intellect, as we have been
supposing, it follows that the emotions of consciousness must
be formally or linguistically expressed, not only materially
or psychically expressed, before a transition can be made
from the level of consciousness to that of intellect: for their
formal or linguistic expression is a necessary element in the
consolidation of experience at the level of consciousness.
The merely material expression of such emotions, on the
contrary, is a retrograde step, which by reducing the con-
scious level to terms of the psychical impedes the develop-
ment of experience towards its higher levels. Not that this
material expression is in itself retrograde; on the contrary,
it is the way in which consciousness asserts its domination
over psychical experience as such, by creating a new com-
bination of its elements; but if it could go unsupplemented
by formal expression, it would indicate a mind unwilling
to test its fate in further adventures.

§ 3. Imaginative Expression

The peculiarity of psychical expression lies in its being
completely uncontrollable. Physiologically considered, a
grimace of pain or a start of fear is an action ; but as it occurs
in us, it is something that simply comes to us and over-
whelms us. It has the same character of brute givenness 1
which belongs to the emotions it expresses, and the sensa of
which these are the emotional charge. This is merely the
general character of experience at its purely psychical level.

1 For the meaning of this, see pp. 206-14: e.g. 'brute violence’, p. 214.

LANGUAGE 235

At the level of awareness a certain change occurs. For
brute givenness is substituted the consciousness of experience
as our own experience, something belonging to us and
dominated by our power of thought. This change affects
all the three elements distinguished in the foregoing section.
The way in which it affects the sensuous and emotional
elements has been discussed at length in the preceding
chapters. We saw that the work of consciousness converts
impressions of brute sense and brute emotion into ideas,
something which we no longer simply feel but feel in that
new way which we call imagining. We have now to consider
how the same change affects the bodily act of expression,
raising it from the crudely psychical level to the imaginative.

The general nature of this change can be expressed by
saying that just as our emotions no longer arise in us as brute
facts, but are now dominated in such a way that we can
summon them up, suppress them, or alter them by an act
of which we are conscious as our own act and therefore as
free, even though it cannot be called purposive or selective;
so the bodily acts which express these emotions, instead of
being simply automatisms of our psycho-physical organism,
are experienced in our new self-consciousness as activities
belonging to ourselves, and controlled in the same sense as
the emotions they express.

Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, in so far as
they come under our control and are conceived by us, in our
awareness of controlling them, as our way of expressing these
emotions, are language. The word ‘language’ is here used
not in its narrow and etymologically proper sense to denote
activities of our vocal organs, but in a wider sense in which
it includes any activity of any organ which is expressive in
the same way in which speech is expressive. In this wide
sense, language is simply bodily expression of emotion,
dominated by thought in its primitive form as consciousness.

Language here exists in its absolutely original shape. It
has a long way still to travel. Later, it has to be profoundly
modified in order to meet the demands of intellect. But any

236 LANGUAGE

theory of language must begin here. If we begin by studying
the result of these further modifications, the language we
use for expressing our thoughts concerning the world around
us and the structure of thought itself, and take this highly
developed and highly specialized form of language as repre-
senting the universal and fundamental character of language
as such, we shall get nowhere. The grammatical and logical
articulations of intellectualized language are no more
fundamental to language as such than the articulations of
bone and limb are fundamental to living tissue. Beneath all
the elaboration of specialized organisms lies the primitive
life of the cell; beneath all the machinery of word and
sentence lies the primitive language of mere utterance, the
controlled act in which we express our emotions.

Materially, this act does not differ at all from that of
psychical expression. As an idea differs from an impression
not in its own intrinsic nature, but in its relation to the
general structure of experience, so an expressive act may be
an act of precisely the same kind, whether its expressiveness
is psychical or imaginative. Every one who is accustomed to
looking after small children, in addition to distinguishing the
cry of pain from the cry of hunger and so forth — various
kinds of psychical expression — learns to distinguish the
automatic cry of uncontrolled emotion from the self-
conscious cry which seems (through a certain exaggeration
on the listener’s part) deliberately uttered in order to call
attention to its needs and to scold the person to whom it
seems addressed for not attending to them. The second cry
is still a mere cry; it is not yet speech; but it is language. It
stands in a new relation to the child’s experience as a whole.
It is the cry of a child aware of itself and asserting itself.
With that utterance, language is born; its articulation into
fully developed speech in English or French or some other
vernacular is only a matter of detail. The crucial difference
lies in this, that the child, instead of making a certain noise
automatically and involuntarily, has learnt to make it, as we
say, 'on purpose’; by which we mean, not that it has a

LANGUAGE 237

purpose in the strict sense, a plan preposition sibi , a fore-
knowledge of what is to be done in advance of setting out
to do it, but that its action is controlled instead of being
automatic.

The merely psychical expression of emotion is already
highly differentiated; but this is nothing to the differentia-
tion achieved by language. Before it begins to control its
cries and convert them into utterances, a child certainly cries
in a considerable number of ways, to express emotions of
different kinds. But these ways are very few, compared with
the kinds of sound which it learns to make when once it has
learnt the art of controlled utterance. These differentiations
would not be made and retained 1 unless they w'ere needed ;
and the reason why so many are needed is because the
emotional life of conscious experience is so immensely richer
than that of experience at its psychical level. Quite apart
from the specifically new emotions of consciousness, of
which something was said in the preceding section, the
conversion of impression into idea by the work of conscious-
ness immensely multiplies the emotions that demand
expression. At the level of merely psychical experience,
what I hear at the present moment is one noise, carry-
ing one emotional charge. If I bring my attention to bear
on this, I can hear in it several different traffic-noises,
several different bird-songs, the tick of my clock, the scratch
of my pen, a step on the stair, each isolated from the rest
by the focusing work of attention, and each carrying an
emotional charge of its own. By further acts of attention I
can recover sounds which still ring in my memory, though
I should describe myself as not actually hearing them at the
moment: the harsh January song of the thrush to whose
mellow May notes I am now listening, the typewriter which
is sometimes at work in the next room, and so forth. For all

1 I have heard a child spend an hour or two each morning, at the age of
about six months, experimenting in the production of vocal sounds, and
discovering for itself in this way numerous sounds not existing in English
(e.g. Arabic consonants) which it gradually ceased to practise when it found
them not required in its mother-tongue.

238 LANGUAGE

these experiences the conscious mind must devise expressions,
where purely psychical experience, hearing one noise with
one emotional tone, would need only one. Thus the imagina-
tive experience creates for itself, by an infinite work of
refraction and reflection and condensation and dispersal, an
infinity of emotions demanding for their expression an
infinite subtlety in the articulations of the language it creates
in expressing them.

To whatever level of experience an emotion may belong,
it cannot be felt without being expressed. There are no
unexpressed emotions. At the psychical level this is easy to
see; a psychical emotion, if felt at all, is psychically expressed
by an automatic reaction of the animal that feels it. At the
conscious level it is not so obvious. We are accustomed,
indeed, to believe the opposite; we commonly think that
the artist’s business is to find expressions for emotions which
he already feels before expressing them. But this belief
cannot be true, if the expressions which he invents are
appropriate to the emotions they express; for his expressions
are conscious expressions, consciously invented, and these
can be appropriate only to emotions which themselves belong
to the conscious level of experience. It is not all emotions
that can be expressed in language, but only emotions of
consciousness or psychical emotions raised to the level of
consciousness; and the same consciousness which generates
these emotions or converts them from impressions into ideas
generates also and simultaneously their appropriate linguistic
expression.

What, then, do we mean when we say that the artist finds
expression for an emotion hitherto unexpressed? We mean
that an emotion belonging to the conscious level of experi-
ence has a dual nature, ‘material’ and ‘formal’. Materially it
is a certain constellation of psychic emotions; formally, it is
a conscious emotion. Now a constellation of psychic emo-
tions is simply a number of psychic emotions, each of
which has already its appropriate psychic expression. A
person who becomes conscious of himself as feeling these

LANGUAGE 239

psychic emotions is thereby generating in himself a conscious
emotion, formally distinct from each and all of them; and
simultaneously generating a conscious expression for it.
Thus, what are called unexpressed emotions are emotions at
one level of experience, already expressed in the way appro-
priate to that level, of which the person who feels them is
trying to become conscious : that is, trying to convert into the
material of an experience at a higher level, which when he
achieves it will be at once an emotion at this higher level
and an expression appropriate to it.

Let us now return to the case which I described at the
beginning of this chapter, and ask what light has been
thrown upon it by the intervening discussions. A child
throws its bonnet off its head and into the road with the
exclamation ‘Hattiaw’. By comparison with the self-
conscious cry discussed earlier in the present section, this
represents a highly developed and sophisticated use of
language. To begin with, consider the emotion involved.
The child might remove its bonnet because it felt physically
uncomfortable in it, hot or tickled or the like; but the
satisfaction expressed by the cry of ‘Hattiaw’ is not a merely
psycho-physical pleasure like that of rubbing a fly off the
nose. What is expressed is a sense of triumph, an emotion
arising out of the possession of self-consciousness. The
child is proving itself as good a man as its mother, who has
previously taken its bonnet off with the words it is now
imitating; better than its mother, because now she has put
the bonnet on and wants it to stay on, so there is a conflict
of wills in which the child feels himself victor.

This feeling, like any feeling, has to be expressed in a
bodily action. As it is a feeling arising from self-conscious-
ness, that is, at the imaginative level of experience, it must
be expressed in a controlled action, an action done ‘on
purpose’, not a merely automatic one. But there are two
controlled actions in the case. There is the throwing off of
the bonnet, and there is the cry of triumph. Why should not
one be enough for the purpose ?

240 LANGUAGE

The relation between the removal of the bonnet and the
cry is parallel to the relation, in the preceding section,
between the terrifying colour and the terrified start. These,
it will be remembered, occupied the first and third places in
a series constituting a single indivisible experience, where
the second place was filled by the emotion of fear. In the
present case, the removal of the bonnet stands in the first
place; the emotion of triumph in the second; the cry in the
third. These together form a single experience, the experi-
ence of triumph over the child’s mother.

This experience is an achievement of the child’s self-
consciousness. It arises out of another experience belonging
to the same level, namely, the child’s finding itself in the
condition of being all dressed up and wheeled about in a
perambulator with a safety-strap round its waist. By the
operation of its own self-consciousness, it discovers itself to
be in this state, and recognizes the state as one brought about
by its mother’s will, without its own consent. It therefore
feels humiliated. At this stage two courses are open to it,
though of course it does not know that; it does not choose,
it simply acts as its nature prompts it. It might find some
way of escaping from the situation, by taking refuge in some
action not really relevant to it; for example, bursting into
peevish tears of futile because undeserved self-pity. Or it
might respond directly to the situation by some act proving
that, after all, it is not a baby but a real person. It takes the
second alternative. It throws off the symbol of its babyhood;
its heart leaps up with a sense of triumph; and, to express
that emotion, with admirable and ironic fitness it steals its
mother’s thunder, using (as nearly as it can command them)
the very words with which she has expressed her superiority
over itself.

We may state this, if we like, by saying that the child is
‘imitating’ its mother. But that is a bad word to use, because
it tends to burke inquiry into why and how such imitation
takes place. Attempts have been made to explain the origin
of language in the child by reference to a supposed instinct

LANGUAGE 241

of imitation, v/hich leads it to copy whatever it finds others
doing, and thus, when it finds them speaking, to acquire the
same art itself. But, supposing there were such an instinct,
the behaviour prompted by it would never become language
unless it were so far released from the automatic control of
the supposed instinct as to come under the conscious control
of the child’s will, so as to express what the child wants it to
express. This can happen only if and when the child becomes
self-conscious. But when that happens, the child will begin
to talk without the operation of this instinct. The supposed
instinct of imitation, therefore, being one of those entities
which ought not to be multiplied beyond necessity, is an
idle fiction. The only possible use it can have is to explain
how the child, before reaching the self-conscious level of
experience, could already familiarize itself with a large
number of bodily movements which, when that level is
reached, could be used as language. Actually, a child begins
to acquire the detailed movements of speech only when its
consciousness has already developed to the point of needing
them. It imitates the speech of others because it already
realizes that they are speaking.

§ 4. Language and Languages

We have been using the word ‘language’ to signify any
controlled and expressive bodily activity, no matter what
part of the body is involved. There is a tendency to think
that there is only one such activity, or at least one which
enormously outdistances any other in expressiveness,
namely speech, or the activities of the vocal organs. Some-
times it is suggested that there is a physiological reason for
this supposed fact, namely, that by using our vocal organs
we can perform a variety of actions more subtly differen-
tiated, and therefore more suitable for development into a
language, than by using any other combination of organs.
It seems more than doubtful whether either the original
belief, or the reason given for it, is true. Probably any one
of a number of kinds of bodily action is as suitable for

242 LANGUAGE

expressive use, intrinsically, as any other; and the pre-emin-
ence of one over the rest would seem to depend on the historical
development of this or that civilization. All speakers do not
use all parts of the vocal machinery alike. Germans speak
more with the larynx, Frenchmen more with the lips. It is
very probable that, because of this difference, Frenchmen
have a finer control over lip-movements and Germans over
throat-movements; but it is certainly not true that the differ-
ence itself is based on a physiological difference independent
of it and prior to it, a difference of organic structure in
virtue of which Germans are more sensitive in the larynx
and Frenchmen in the front of the mouth. Had that been
the case, these special sensitivities would be biological
characteristics, inherited like skull-shape and pigmentation;
and the ability to speak French or German in the proper
way would depend on the speaker’s pedigree. This is
notoriously not the case. The groupings recognized by
physical anthropology do not coincide with those of cultural
anthropology.

If Frenchmen find lip-movements more expressive than
throat-movements, and Germans the opposite, the same
kind of difference may exist as between movements of the
vocal organs and various other kinds of movement. A dispute
between Italian peasants is conducted hardly more in words
than in a highly elaborated language of manual gesture.
Here again, there is no physiological basis for the difference.
Italians do not possess more sensitive fingers than northern
Europeans. But they have a long tradition of controlled
finger-gesture, going back to the ancient game of micare
digitis.

Vocal language is thus only one among many possible
languages or orders of languages. Any of these might, by
a particular civilization, be developed into a highly organized
form of emotional expression. It is sometimes fancied that
although any one of these languages might express emotion,
vocal language has an exclusive, or at least a pre-eminent,
function i h the expression of thought. Even if this were

LANGUAGE 2+3

true, it would not be of interest at the present stage in our
discussion, for we are now dealing with language as it is
before being adapted to serve the purposes of thought. As
a matter of fact, it is probably not true. There is a story that
Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion,
broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may
break into Greek : he took a flower in his hand, and looked
at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him,
‘You have understood me.’

Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the
peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound,
so that it can be perceived through the ear as well as through
the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him
tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of
sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures
made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth
and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental
facts about speech when we think of it as something that
can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our
clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the
spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm,
are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader,
unless the words are to fall flat and meaningless, must
speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed
book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of
Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for
himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of
expression.

All the different kinds of language have a relation of this
kind to bodily gesture. The art of painting is intimately
bound up with the expressiveness of the gestures made by
the hand in drawing, and of the imaginary gestures through
which a spectator of a painting appreciates its ‘tactile values’.
Instrumental music has a similar relation to silent movements
of the larynx, gestures of the player’s hand, and real or
imaginary movements, as of dancing, in the audience. Every
kind of language is in this way a specialized form of bodily

244 LANGUAGE

gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the
mother of all languages.

This is what justifies the paradox of the behaviourists,
that thought is nothing but the movements of the vocal
organs which are commonly said to express it. For thought
we must read in the present context emotion, and emotion at
the imaginative level, not the merely psychic. For the vocal
organs we must read the entire body; since speech is only
one form of gesture. As thus corrected, the doctrine is true in
this important sense: that the expression of emotion is not,
as it were, a dress made to fit an emotion already existing,
but is an activity without which the experience of that
emotion cannot exist. Take away the language, and you
take away what it expressed; there is nothing left but crude
feeling at the merely psychic level.

Different civilizations have developed for their own use
different languages; not merely different forms of speech,
distinguished as English from French and so on, but different
in a much deeper way. We have seen how Buddha expressed
a philosophical idea in a gesture, and how the Italian peasant
uses his fingers hardly less expressively than his tongue.
The habit of going heavily clothed cramps the expressiveness
of all bodily parts except the face; if the clothing were heavy
enough, only those gestures would retain their expressiveness
which can be appreciated without being seen, such as those
of the vocal organs; except so far as the clothes themselves
were expressive. The cosmopolitan civilization of modern
Europe and # America, with its tendency towards rigidly
uniform dress , 1 has limited our expressive activities almost

1 Even so, dress is a kind of language; but when it is rigidly uniform the
only emotions which it can express are emotions common to those who wear it.
The habit of wearing it focuses the attention of the wearer on emotions of
this kind, and at once generates and expresses a permanant ‘set’ or habit of
consciously feeling in the corresponding way. Rupert Brooke noticed that
Americans ‘walk better than we; more freely, with a taking swing, and almost
with grace. How much of this’, he adds, ‘is due to living in a democracy, and
how much to wearing no braces, it is very difficult to determine’ ( Letters
from America , p. 16). Dropping the uniform carries with it a curious
breach in the emotional habit; Mulvaney found that on discarding his

LANGUAGE 245

entirely to the voice, and naturally tries to justify itself by
asserting that the voice is the best medium for expression.

But different languages are not related to one and the
same set of feelings like his different suits of clothes to one
and the same man. If there is no such thing as an unex-
pressed feeling, there is no way of expressing the same feeling
in two different media. This is true both of the relation
between different systems of speech and of the relation
between vocal language and other forms of language. An
Englishman who can talk French, if he reflects on his own
experience, knows very well that he feels differently when
he talks a different tongue. The English tongue will only
express English emotions; to talk French you must adopt
the emotions of a Frenchman. To be multilingual is to be
a chameleon of the emotions. Still more clearly is it true
that the emotions which we express in music can never be
expressed in speech, and vice versa. Music is one order of
languages and speech is another ; each expresses what it does
express with absolute clarity and precision; but what they
express is two different types of emotion, each proper to
itself. The same is true of manual gesture. Contempt may
be expressed by shouting an insult at a man or by snapping
your fingers under his nose, as joy may be expressed in a
poem or a symphony; but with a difference; the precise
kind of contempt which is expressed in the one way cannot
be expressed in the other.

Now, if a person acquires the ability to express one kind
of emotions and not another, the result will be that he knows

trousers and donning a loin-cloth he began to feel like an Indian native
(Kipling, The Incarnation of Krishna Muhaney), The consciousness of
sharing uniform dress with a circle of others is thus a consciousness of emo-
tional solidarity with them; and this, on its negative side, takes the form of
emotional hostility towards persons outside that circle. To illustrate this
from the history of parties and classes is superfluous. It may be worth while
to point out that in the liberal political theory, where rivalry between policies
is dissociated from emotional hostility between the persons supporting them,
it is essential that parties should not be distinguished by uniforms. Put your
parties into uniform, and the difference of their policies becomes at once a less
important division between them than their emotional hostility.

2+6 LANGUAGE

the one kind to be in him, but not the other. These others
will be in him as mere brute feelings, never mastered and
controlled, but either concealed in the darkness of his own
self-ignorance or breaking in upon him in the shape of
passion-storms which he can neither control nor understand.
Consequently, if a civilization loses all power of expression
except through the voice, and then asserts that the voice is
the best expressive medium, it is simply saying that it knows
of nothing in itself that is worth expressing except what can
be thus expressed ; and that is a tautology, for it merely means
‘what we (members of this particular society) do not know
we do not know', except so far as it suggests the addition :
‘and we do not wish to find out.’

I said that ‘the dance is the mother of all languages’ ; this
demands further explanation. I meant that every kind or
order of language (speech, gesture, and so forth) was an off-
shoot from an original language of total bodily gesture. This
would have to be a language in which every movement and
every stationary poise of every part of the body had the same
kind of significance which movements of the vocal organs
possess in a spoken language. A person using it would be
speaking with every part of himself. Now, in calling this an
‘original’ language, I am not indulging (God forbid) in that
kind of a ■priori archaeology which attempts to reconstruct
man’s distant past without any archaeological data. I do not
place it in the remote past. I place it in the present. I mean
that each one of us, whenever he expresses himself, is doing
so with his whole body, and is thus actually talking in this
‘original’ language of total bodily gesture. This may seem
absurd. Some peoples, we know, cannot talk without waving
their hands and shrugging their shoulders and waving their
bodies about, but others can and do. That is no objection
to what I am saying. Rigidity is a gesture, no less than
movement. If there were people who never talked unless
they were standing stiffly at attention, it would be because
that gesture was expressive of a permanent emotional habit
which they felt obliged to express concurrently with any

LAN G U AG E 247

other emotion they might happen to be expressing. This
‘original’ language of total bodily gesture is thus the one
and only real language, which everybody who is in any way
expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech
and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which
have undergone specialized development ; in this specialized
development they never come altogether detached from the
parent organism.

This parent organism is nothing but the totality of our
motor activities, raised from the psychical level to the con-
scious level. It is our bodily activity as that of which we are
conscious. But that which is raised from the psychical level
to the conscious level is converted by the work of conscious-
ness from impression to idea, from object of sensation to
object of imagination. The language of total bodily gesture
is thus the motor side of our total imaginative experience.
This last phrase was used in Chapter VII, § 6, as a name for
the work of art proper. We are now beginning to see that the
theory of art which is going to emerge from Book II will
either consist in, or at least involve, the identification of art
with language.

§ 5. Speaker and Hearer 1

In its most elementary form, language is not addressed
to any audience. A child’s first utterances are so completely
unaddressed that one cannot even describe them as addressed
to the world at large or to itself. The distinction between
speaking to oneself, speaking to the world at large, and
speaking to a particular person or group, is a later differen-
tiation introduced into an original act which was simply the
act of speaking. Now, speech is a function of self-conscious-
ness ; therefore, even at this early stage, a speaker is conscious
of himself as speaking, and is thus a listener to himself. The
experience of speaking is also an experience of listening.

The origin of self-consciousness, whether that phrase is
understood psychologically, to mean the stages by which it

1 In this section, whatever is said of speech is meant of language in general.

I

248 LANGUAGE

comes into existence, or metaphysically, to mean the reasons
why it begins to exist, is a problem I shall not discuss. There
is one thing, however, which ought here to be said about it.
Consciousness does not begin as a mere self-consciousness,
establishing in each one of us the idea of himself, as a person
or centre of experience, and then proceed by some process,
whether of ‘projection’ or of argument by analogy, to con-
struct or infer other persons. Each one of us is a finite being,
surrounded by others of the same kind; and the conscious-
ness of our own existence is also the consciousness of the
existence of these others. Being a form of thought, con-
sciousness is liable to error (Chapter X, § 7) ; and when first
a child discovers its own existence it simultaneously discovers
the existence not only of its mother or nurse but of other
persons like a cat, a tree, a firelight shadow, a piece of wood,
where errors in admitting this or that neighbour to the
category of person are no doubt correlative to errors in its
conception of its own personality. But, however much the
discovery (like any other discovery) is at first involved in
error, the fact remains that the child’s discovery of itself as a
person is also its discovery of itself as a member of a world
of persons.

Self-consciousness makes a person of what, apart from
that, would be merely a sentient organism. The relations
between sentient organisms as such are constituted by the
various modes of sympathy which arise out of psychical
expression of their feelings. Since persons are organisms,
they too are connected by relations of this kind. But, as
persons, they construct a new set of relations between them-
selves, arising out of their consciousness of themselves and
one another; these are linguistic relations. The discovery
of myself as a person is the discovery that I can speak, and
am thus a persona or speaker; in speaking, I am both speaker
and hearer; and since the discovery of myself as a person is
also the discovery of other persons around me, it is the dis-
covery of speakers and hearers other than myself. Thus,
from the first, the experience of speech contains in itself in

LANGUAGE s 49

principle the experiences of speaking to others and of hearing
others speak to me. How this principle works out in practice
depends on how, in detail, I identify persons among my
surroundings.

The relation between speaker and hearer, as two distinct
persons, is one which, because of its very familiarity, is
easily misunderstood. We are apt to think of it as one in
which the speaker ‘communicates’ his emotions to the hearer.
But emotions cannot be shared like food or drink, or handed
over like old clothes. To speak of communicating an emotion,
if it means anything, must mean causing another person to
have emotions like those which I have myself. But inde-
pendently of language neither he nor I nor any third person
can compare his emotions with mine, so as to find out whether
they are like or unlike. If we speak of such comparison, we
speak of something that is done by the use of language; so
that the comparison must be defined in terms of speaking
and hearing, not speaking and hearing in terms of such com-
parison. If, however, the relation between emotion and
language has been correctly described in § 3, sense can be
made of these phrases. They will then be analysed as follows.

When language is said to express emotion, this means that
there is a single experience which has two elements in it.
First, there is an emotion of a specific kind, not a psychic
emotion or impression, but an emotion of which the person
who has it is conscious, and which by this consciousness he
has converted from impression into idea. Secondly, there is
a controlled bodily action in which he expresses this idea.
The expression is not an afterthought to the idea; the two
are inseparably united, so that the idea is had as an idea only
in so far as it is expressed. The expression is speech, and the
speaker is his own first hearer. As hearing himself speak, he
is conscious of himself as the possessor of the idea which he
hears himself expressing. Thus two statements are both true,
which might easily be thought to contradict each other:
(1) it is only because we know what we feel that we can
express it in words; (2) it is only because we express them in

. i

250 LANGUAGE

words that we know what our emotions are. In the first, we
describe our situation as speakers; in the second, our situa-
tion as hearers of what we ourselves say. The two statements
refer to the same union of idea with expression, but they
consider this union from opposite ends.

The person to whom speech is addressed is already
familiar with this double situation. If he were not, it would
be useless to address him. He, too, is a speaker, and is
accustomed to make his emotions known to himself by
speaking to himself. Each of the two persons concerned is
conscious of the other’s personality as correlative to his own;
each is conscious of himself as a person in a world of persons,
and for the present purpose this world consists of these two.
The hearer, therefore, conscious that he is being addressed
by another person like himself (without that original con-
sciousness the so-called communication of emotion by lan-
guage could never take place), takes what he hears exactly
as if it were speech of his own : he speaks to himself with the
words that he hears addressed to him, and thus constructs
in himself the idea which those words express. At the same
time, being conscious of the speaker as a person other than
himself, he attributes that idea to this other person. Under-
standing what some one says to you is thus attributing to him
the idea which his words arouse in yourself; and this implies
treating them as words of your own.

This might seem to presuppose community of language
between the speaker and hearer; for unless they were accus-
tomed to use the same words, the hearer in using them to
himself would not mean the same thing by them. But
community of language is not another situation independent
of the situation we have been describing, and prior to it: it is
one name by which we refer to that situation itself. One does
not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it
and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by
repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.

The reader may object that if what is here maintained
were true there could never be any absolute assurance, either

LANGUAGE 251

for the hearer or for the speaker, that the one had understood
the other. That is so ; but in fact there is no such assurance.
The only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative
assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation
proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to
the other to be talking nonsense. The question whether they
understand each other sohitur interloquendo. If they under-
stand each other well enough to go on talking, they under-
stand each other as well as they need; and there is no better
kind of understanding which they can regret not having
attained.

The possibility of such understanding depends on the
hearer’s ability to reconstruct in his own consciousness the
idea expressed by the words he hears. This reconstruction
is an act of imagination; and it cannot be performed unless
the hearer’s experience has been such as to equip him for it.
We have already seen (Chapter X, § 4, end) that, as all ideas
are derived from impressions, no idea can be formed as such
in consciousness except by a mind whose sensuous-emotional
experience contains the corresponding impression, at least
in a faint and submerged shape, at that very moment. If
words, however eloquent and well chosen, are addressed to a
hearer in whose mind there is no impression corresponding to
the idea they are meant to convey, he will either treat them as
nonsense, or will attribute to them (possibly with the caution
that the speaker has not expressed himself very well) a mean-
ing derived from his own experience and forced upon them
in spite of an obvious misfit. The same thing will happen if,
although the hearer has the right impression in his mind, he
suffers from a corruption of consciousness (Chapter X, § 6)
which will not allow him to attend to it.

Misunderstanding is not necessarily the hearer’s fault; it
may be the speaker’s. This will be the case if through
corruption in his own consciousness the idea which he
expresses is a falsified one; certain elements, which are in
fact essential to the expressed idea, being disowned. Any
attempt on the hearer’s part to reconstruct the idea for himself

252 LANGUAGE

will (unless his own consciousness happens to be similarly
corrupted) result in his rediscovering, as an integral part of
the idea, this disowned element; and thus speaker and hearer
will be again at cross-purposes.

§ 6. Language and Thought

In one sense language is wholly an activity of thought,
and thought is all it can ever express ; for the level of experi-
ence to which it belongs is that of awareness or consciousness
or imagination, and this level has been shown to belong not
to the realm of sensation or psychical experience, but to the
realm of thought. But if thought is taken in its narrower
sense of intellect, language together with imaginative ex-
perience as such falls outside it and below it. Language
in its original nature expresses not thought in this narrower
sense, but only emotions; though these are not crude im-
pressions, but are transmuted into ideas through the activity
of consciousness.

I have already said that there is a secondary stage in its
development, where language undergoes modification to
serve the purposes of intellect. It might be supposed that,
because art is the imaginative expression of emotion (Chap-
ters VI, VII), this secondary development is of no interest
to the aesthetician as such. This would be a mistake. Even
if art never expresses thought as such, but only emotion,
the emotions it expresses are not only the emotions of a
merely conscious experient, they include the emotions of a
thinker; and consequently a theory of art must consider the
question : how, if at all, must language be modified in order
to bring the expression of these emotions within its scope?

The general distinction between imagination and intellect
is that imagination presents to itself an object which it
experiences as one and indivisible: whereas intellect goes
beyond that single object and presents to itself a world of
many such with relations of determinate kinds between
them.

Everything which imagination presents to itself is a here,

LANGUAGE 253

a now; something complete in itself, absolutely self-con-
tained, unconnected with anything else by the relations
between what it is and what it is not, what it is and that
because of which it is what it is, what it is and what it might
have been, what it is and what it ought to be. If any of
these distinctions are imported into the object of imagination,
it absorbs them; the duality of terms with a relation between
them disappears, and leaves only a trace of itself in the shape
of a modification in the quality of the whole. For example:
I listen to a thrush singing. By mere sensation I hear at any
given moment only one note or one fragment of a note. By
imagination what I have been hearing continues to vibrate
in my thought as an idea, so that the whole sung phrase is
present to me as an idea at a single moment. I may now go
on to a further act, by which I imagine alongside of this
present May thrush-song the thrush-song of January. So
far as the entire experience remains at the level of imagina-
tion, as distinct from that of intellect, these two songs are
not imagined separately as two things with a relation between
them. The January song coalesces with the May song, and
confers upon it a new quality of mature mellowness. Thus
what I imagine, however complex it may be, is imagined as
a single whole, where relations between the parts are present
simply as qualities of the whole.

If, starting from the same experience of listening to a
bird-song, I now begin to think about it, in the narrower
sense of that word, I analyse it into parts. From being an
indivisible unity it becomes a manifold, a network of things
with relations between them. Here is one note, and here
another, higher or lower, softer or louder. Each is different
from the other, and different in a definite way. I can think
of these qualities by themselves, and reflect that a note might
be higher and louder than another, or higher and softer. I
can describe the difference between two songs by saying that
one has a sweeter tone than the other, or is longer, or
contains more notes. This is analytic thought.

Another thing that I can do is to go beyond what I am

Wfl S

I

254 LANGUAGE

imagining and consider its relation to other things which
I am not imagining. For example, I may be unable at the
moment to call up to my mind any remembrance (that is, any
imagination) of what the January thrush-song is like; but
I can remember facts about it, even if I cannot remember
itself; I can, for example, remember the fact that I heard it
four months ago at dawn. Memory in this second sense is a
kind of intellectual paper-money which I cannot exchange
for the gold of memory in the first sense; it is the thought of
something as occupying a certain place in the scheme of
things (here, in space and time) without the thought of what
the thing which occupies that place actually and in itself is.
This thought of something indeterminate, which if it were
determinate would occupy a certain position, is abstract
thought.

These are not the only kinds of thought (for I shall now
begin to use that word only in its narrower sense). They are
given merely as examples of what thought does which
imagination, never analytic and never abstract, cannot do.
Language has to be adapted to the expression of these new
kinds of experience. For this purpose it has itself to undergo
parallel changes.

§ 7. The Grammatical Analysis of Language

First, language is analysed, by the work of the intellect
j itself, grammatically. In this process there are three stages.

(1) Language is an activity; it is expressing oneself, or
speaking. But this activity is not what the grammarian
analyses. He analyses a product of this activity, ‘speech’ or
‘discourse’ not in the sense of a speaking or a discoursing, but
in the sense of something brought into existence by that
activity. This product of the activity of speaking is nothing
real; it is a metaphysical fiction. It is believed to exist only
because the theory of language is approached from the stand-
point of the philosophy of craft, and the assumption un-
questioningly made that any activity is essentially a kind of
fabricating. That being so, the activity of expression will be

LANGUAGE 255

essentially the fabricating of a thing called language, and
the endeavour to understand that activity will take the form
of an endeavour to understand its product. This may seem
a futile undertaking. What possible result, good or bad, can
come of trying to understand a thing which does not exist ?
The answer (which is already clear to an attentive reader of
Chapter VI, § 1) is that these metaphysical fictions are in
one sense real enough. The person who tries to understand
them is fixing his attention on a real thing, but is distorting
his ideas about it by attempting to harmonize them with
a preconception which is in fact false. Thus, what the
grammarian is really doing is to think, not about a product
of the activity of speaking, but about that activity itself,
distorted in his thoughts about it by the assumption that
it is not an activity, but a product or ‘thing ’. 1

(2) Next, this ‘thing’ must be scientifically studied; and
this involves a double process. The first stage of this process
is to cut the ‘thing’ up into parts. Some readers will object
to this phrase on the ground that I have used a verb of
acting when I ought to have used a verb of thinking; a
dangerous habit, they will remind me, because when you
get to the point of saying ‘thought constructs the world’ when
you mean ‘some one thinks how the world is constructed’,
you have slipped into idealism through mere looseness of
language; and that, they will add, is the way idealists are
made. There is much that might be said in answer to this
objection; as, that philosophical controversies are not to be
settled by a kind of police-regulation governing people’s
choice of words, and that a school of thought (to dignify it
by that name) which depends for its existence on enforcing
a particular jargon is a school which I neither respect nor
fear. But I prefer to reply merely that I said cut because I
meant cut. The division of the ‘thing’ known as language
into words is a division not discovered, but devised, in the
process of analysing it.

1 I use quotation marks in order to show that the word is being used not
in its actual English sense, but as a technical term in metaphysics.

256 LANGUAGE

(3) The final process is to devise a scheme of relations
between the parts thus divided. Here again we must refuse
to be frightened by the bogy of idealism. The relations are
not discovered, they are, we must insist, devised. If the
terms are devised, the relations between them are devised too;
the more so because the processes here numbered (2) and
(3) are not separate, but concurrent, since any modification
in either of them entails modifications in the other. The
scheme of relations falls under certain customary heads.

(a) Lexicography. Every word, as it actually occurs in
discourse, occurs once and once only. But if the dissection
is skilfully carried out, there will be words here and there
which are so like one another that they can be treated as
recurrences of the same word. Thus we get a new fiction :
the recurring word, the entity which forms the lexico-
grapher’s unit. That this is a fiction is, I think, not difficult
to grasp. In the sentence I have just written, the word ‘is’
occurs twice. But the relation between these two is not one
of identity. Both phonetically and logically the two are alike,
but not more than alike.

The lexicographer has a second task, namely, to settle the
‘meanings’ of these fictitious entities. He does this, of course,
by using words; so that this part of his work is carried out
by establishing relations of synonymity. These relations are
as fictitious as the terms which they relate; and the con-
scientious lexicographer soon becomes aware of this. Even
granted the division of language into words and the primary
classification of these into lexicographical units, no one of
these units is ever quite synonymous with any other.

(h) Accidence. When lexicography has established the
units dotninus, domine> dominum, these are regarded not as
separate words, but as modifications of a single word taking
place according to definite rules. These rules, again, are
palpable fictions; for it is notorious that exceptions to them
occur; and consequently they can be assimilated to scientific
laws only if a theory of science be accepted according to
which its laws hold good not universally, but only (in

LANGUAGE 257

Aristotle’s phrase) 'for the most part*. This, in fact, was the
theory which presided over the birth of grammar*, and al-
though it is not now accepted by anybody, it still tacitly
underlies whatever claim grammar may possess to the name
of a science.

(c) Syntax . Words as actually ‘used’ are parts of larger
units called sentences. The grammatical modification which
each word undergoes in a given sentence is a function of its
relation to others either expressly present or implied in the
sentence. The rules determining these functions are called
rules of syntax.

The grammatical manipulation of language is so familiar
to ourselves, who have learnt it from the Greeks as an
essential part of those transmitted and developing customs
which make up our civilization, that we take it for granted
and forget to inquire into its motives. We vaguely suppose
it to be a science; we think that the grammarian, when he
takes a discourse and divides it into parts, is finding out the
truth about it, and that when he lays down rules for the
relations between these parts he is telling us how people’s
minds work when they speak. This is very far from being
the truth. A grammarian is not a kind of scientist studying
the actual structure of language; he is a kind of butcher,
converting it from organic tissue into marketable and edible
joints. Language as it lives and grows no more consists of
verbs, nouns, and so forth than animals as they live and grow
consist of forehands, gammons, rump-steaks, and other joints.
The grammarian’s real function (I do not call it purpose,
because he does not propose it to himself as a conscious aim)
is not to understand language, but to alter it: to convert it
from a state (its original and native state) in which it expresses
emotion into a secondary state in which it can express thought.

This function is actually fulfilled; but only in a limited
and qualified way. Language would not remain language
unless it remained expressive; and it can do this only by
resisting the grammarian’s efforts so far as to retain a measure
of its original vitality. The division of speech into words is

258 LANGUAGE

precarious and arbitrary; in actual speech these divided
portions coagulate again into phrases which will not come
apart, and which the grammarian is obliged to treat in
defiance of his own principles as if they were single words.
Such a coagulation of several words into a single whole, quite
different from the sum of the words that compose it in their
recognized grammatical relations to each other, is called an
‘idiom’. The word is a curious one. It means something
personal and private, something which reveals a rebellion
on the part of its user against the public usage of his society.
An idiom, therefore, ought to be a mode of speech unin-
telligible to any one except the speaker. But, in fact, idioms
are perfectly intelligible; and all the grammarian has done
by calling them idioms is to admit that his own grammatical
science cannot cope with them, and that the people who use
them have spoken intelligibly when, according to him, what
they say should be meaningless. Again, the lexicographer’s
credit depends on his power of making good the assumption
that a word, as he defines it, is a genuine linguistic unity,
maintaining its identity both of sound and of meaning
through all changes of context. But he is continually being
forced to admit that this assumption is false. In proportion as
language is more thoroughly intellectualized, the occasions
on which it breaks down become rarer; but even the most
completely intellectualized language will suddenly remember
the pit whence it was digged, and laugh at lexicographers by
shifting the meanings of its words according to the context
in which they stand. In the ordinary speech of everyday life,
where intellectualization is relatively low, the lexicographer
can never be victorious in his running fight with the vagaries
of context.

Considerations like these are fatal to the prejudice which
would regard the grammarian’s work as scientific. It does
not follow that grammar is of no use. It is of great use; but
its use is not theoretical, it is practical. The grammarian’s
business is to adapt language to the function of expressing
thought ; and the reason why we tolerate these inconsistencies

LANGUAGE 259

and compromises in his work is that we realize the impor-
tance of his not overdoing it so far as to destroy the ability
of language to express anything at all.

I likened the grammarian to a butcher; but, if so, he is a
butcher of a curious kind. Travellers say that certain African
peoples will cut a steak from a living animal, and cook it
for dinner, the animal being not much the worse. This
may serve to amend the original comparison.

§ 8. The Logical Analysis of Language

All this, however, is only one side of a process whose other
side is known as ‘the traditional logic’. This consists in a
certain technique first systematically expounded, so far as its
earliest expositions are preserved, in Aristotle’s Organon ;
perpetuated and developed by a long line of medieval
logicians; rejected as a futile logomachy by the anti-
Aristotelian movement of the Renaissance and the seven-
teenth century; reaffirmed, with many qualifications due
partly to the influence of that movement and partly to a
renewed study of Aristotle himself, by the so-called idealists
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from Kant to
Bradley and beyond; and restored with fewer qualifications
by the logical analysts and positivists of the present day.

The aim of this technique is to make language into a
perfect vehicle for the expression of thought. We may
explain its nature and purpose by means of a preamble
followed by a resolution : ‘Whereas the aim of persons who
use language in good faith is thereby to express their
thoughts; and whereas this aim is now frustrated by the
inaccuracies and ambiguities besetting the ordinary use of
language; Now therefore let it be resolved that all such
persons do in future express their thoughts by the use of
certain linguistic forms, to be known as “logical forms”.’
The constitutive peculiarities of these so-called logical forms
may, of course, be differently defined by different schools
of thought. For the earlier or Aristotelian school, logical
form meant subject-predicate form, and the logical expression

260 LANGUAGE

of thought meant the expression of it in the form S is P.
For the modern or analytic school this is both inadequate and
misleading, and the main problem of logical expression is
the analysis of a given statement into all the propositions (not
necessarily subject-predicate propositions) which the person
making it is thereby affirming. I am not here concerned
with this or any of the other differences that divide the
technique of analytic logic from that of its Aristotelian
ancestor; only with their fundamental identity of purpose;
and with that only so far as it affects the theory of language.

Any logical technique, whether Aristotelian or analytic or
any other, begins by assuming that the grammatical trans-
formation of language has been successfully accomplished.
The activity of speech has been converted into a ‘thing’;
this ‘thing’ has been cut up into words; these words have
been sorted out according to resemblances into groups, the
words in each group being treated as repetitions of a single
lexicographical unit; these units have been tied down each
to its proper and constant meaning; and, so forth. The
logician’s work begins with the laying down of three further
assumptions.

First comes what I shall call the propositional assumption.
This is the assumption that, among the various ‘sentences’
already distinguished by grammarians, there are some which,
instead of expressing emotions, make statements. It is to
these that the logician confines his attention.

Second, the principle of homolingual translation. This is
an assumption about sentences corresponding to the lexico-
grapher’s assumption about words (or, to be precise, about
what I have called lexicographical units) when he ‘defines
the meaning’ of a given word by equating it with that of
another, or of a group of words taken together. According
to the principle of homolingual translation, one sentence
may have precisely the same meaning as another single
sentence, or group of sentences taken together, in the same
language, so that one may be substituted for the other
without change of meaning.

LANGUAGE 261

The third assumption is that of logical preferability:
namely that, of two sentences or sentence-groups having the
same meaning, one may be preferable, from a logician’s point
of view, to the other. What determines this preferability
depends upon what the logician is trying to do : that is, upon
the aims and principles of his technique. In spite of what
logicians have sometimes said, the preferred sentence or
sentence-group is never preferred as being easier to under-
stand. That criterion is used not by the logician, but by the
stylist. The preferred version is preferred because it is one
which the rules of the logician’s technique enable him to
manipulate.

The Aristotelian logic is mainly concerned with inference.
Its manipulation of propositions is directed to the end of
fitting them into the framework of the syllogism. The
Aristotelian logician is manoeuvring for a position in which
he can say: ‘You are wrong to maintain this view, for you
defend it on such and such grounds, and when you reduce
your premisses to logical form you can see for yourself that
they do not prove the alleged conclusion.’ The modern
analytic logician is interested not in the formal validity of
inferences, but in the ‘content’ of the statements he analyses.
He, too, is interested in polemics; but his method is based
on the conception of error as due not to syllogistic fallacies,
but to confusa cognitio . He therefore manoeuvres for a
position in which he can say: ‘You are wrong to maintain this
view; for in asserting it you are simultaneously asserting
five different propositions, a, b, c, d, and e\ now you will
agree, when you look at them separately for yourself, that
a, b, c, and d are true, but that e is false.’ The logical tech-
nique of these two schools consists of a method for achieving
their respective tactical positions; and the preferability of one
homolingual translation over another is relative to the rules
of the technique adopted.

It is even more obvious here than in the case of gram-
matical analysis that we are concerned with a modification
of language, not a theory of it. As Jowett is said to have

a6a LANGUAGE

remarked, the traditional logic is ‘neither a science nor an
art, but a dodge’. It is a dodge for converting language into
symbolism. Its assumptions are neither certainly nor prob-
ably, nor even possibly, true. They are, in fact, not assump-
tions, but proposals; and what they propose is the conversion
of language into something which, if it could be realized,
would not be language at all. This is partly understood by
the analytic logicians, who in practice adopt a symbolism
like that of mathematics to facilitate their logical mani-
pulations, and in theory assert a convergence, if not an
identity, between logic and mathematics.

Like the grammarian’s modification of language, the
logician’s modification of it can be to a certain extent carried
out. But it can never be carried out in its entirety. When
the attempt is made to do this, what happens is that language
is subjected to a strain tending to pull it apart into two quite
different things, language proper and symbolism. If the
division could be completed, the result would be the state of
things which Dr. Richards is presumably trying to describe
when he distinguishes 1 ‘the two uses of language’. He states
the distinction thus (op. cit., p. 267): ‘A statement may be
used for the sake of the reference , true or false, which it
causes. This is the scientific use of language. But it may also
be used for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude
produced by the reference it occasions. This is the emotive
use of language.’ Dr. Richards assumes, apparently without
realizing that anyone could do otherwise, that language is not
an activity, but something which is ‘used’, and can be ‘used’
in quite different ways while remaining the same ‘thing’,
like a chisel that is used either for cutting wood or for lifting
tacks. With this technical theory of language he combines a
technical theory of art. The ‘emotive use of language’ he
regards as its artistic use. To continue the above quotation
after omitting two sentences: ‘Many arrangements of words
evoke attitudes without any reference being required en
route. They operate like musical phrases.’ This makes clear
1 The Principles of Literary Criticism, ed. a (1926), ch. xxxiv.

LANGUAGE a6 3

the connexion between his technical theory of language and
his technical theory of art. It comes to this, that according
to Dr. Richards there is a complete division between the
‘scientific use of language’, i.e. its use for the making of state-
ments, true or false, and a purely aesthetic quasi-musical
‘use’ which is the extreme case of what he calls the ‘emotive
use’, i.e. its use to evoke emotion. The technical theory
of language is as complete an error as the technical theory
of art, if indeed they are two errors and not one; but what
Dr. Richards is here saying can be restated, eliminating these
errors, by saying that discourse is either scientific discourse
in which statements, true or false, are made, and thought is
expressed; or artistic discourse in which emotion is expressed.

Is this distinction a real one, or is it only a statement of the
two forces between which a tension, but a not altogether
disruptive tension, is introduced into language by the at-
tempt to intellectualize it ? I shall try to show that the latter
alternative is the truth; that language intellectualized by the
work of grammar and logic is never more than partially intel-
lectualized, and that it retains its function as language only in
so far as the intellectualization is incomplete. Language may
by the work of the grammarian and logician become ‘ballasted
with logic’, as Bergson says that space is ‘ballasted with
geometry’ ; but if it were filled up solid with ballast it would
no longer be seaworthy; it would simply founder. To drop
the metaphor, scientific discourse in so far as it is scientific
tries to rid itself of its own function as discourse or language,
emotional expressiveness; but if it succeeded in this attempt
it would no longer be discourse. From the point of view of
language, therefore, the distinction Dr. Richards has drawn
(if my reinterpretation of it is correct, of which I am not sure ;
for it is by no means, as he says, ‘simple’ when ‘once clearly
grasped’) is not a distinction separating scientific discourse
from artistic; it is a distinction within artistic discourse,
between artistic discourse as such and artistic discourse sub-
serving the purposes of intellect. How exactly it subserves
these purposes we must ask later on.

264 LANGUAGE

In the first place, it is a matter of fact that discourse in
which a determined attempt is made to state truths retains
an element of emotional expressiveness. No serious writer
or speaker ever utters a thought unless he thinks it worth
uttering. What makes it worth uttering is not its truth (the
fact that something is true is never a sufficient reason for
saying it), but the fact of its being the one truth which is
important in the present situation. Nor does he ever utter it
except with a choice of words, and in a tone of voice, that
express his sense of this importance. If he is soliloquizing,
his words and his tone convey not only ‘this is important’,
but ‘this is important to me’. If he is addressing an audience,
words and tone convey not only ‘this is important’, but ‘this is
important for you’. In proportion as a writer is skilful in get-
ting his audience to grasp his meaning, attention to his choice
of words and tone of voice will reveal a subtly appropriate
texture of emotional expression. The writer is sometimes
easily confident, sometimes nervous, sometimes pleading,
sometimes amused, sometimes indignant. When Dr. Richards
wants to say that a certain view of Tolstoy’s about art is
mistaken, he says: ‘This is plainly untrue.’ Scientific use
of language, certainly. But how delicately emotive 1 One
hears the lecturing voice, and sees the shape of the lecturer’s
fastidious Cambridge mouth as he speaks the words. One is
reminded of a cat, shaking from its paw a drop of the water
into which it has been unfortunately obliged to step. Tol-
stoy’s theory does not smell quite nice. A person of refine-
ment will not remain in its company longer than he can help.
Hence the abruptness: those four brief words say to the
audience : ‘Do not think I am going to disgust you by dragging
to light all the follies into which unreflective haste led this
great man. Take courage; I dislike this chapter as much as
you do; but it is going to be very short.’

The only obstacle to recognizing this truth is one which,
naturally inherent in the practice of writing down our words
instead of speaking them, has been artificially exaggerated by
an unholy alliance between bad logic and bad literature.

LANGUAGE 265

When some one utters scientific discourse, saying, for ex-
ample: ‘The chemical formula of water is H 2 0,’ the tone and
tempo of his voice make his emotional attitude towards the
thought he is expressing clear to any attentive listener. He
may be bored with it, and concerned only to get through the
routine of a chemistry lesson ; then he will say the words in
a flat, dull tone. He may wish to impress the class with
something they must remember for the sake of their examina-
tions; then he will use a forced and hectoring tone. Or he
may be excited by it, as a triumph of scientific thought which
for him has never lost its freshness; then he will use an alert
and lively tone, and fifty years afterwards an F.R.S. will say
to a friend: ‘It was old Jones, you know, who really taught
me chemistry.’ But in our writing and printing there is no
notation for these differences, and consequently the reader of
a sentence like ‘The chemical formula of water is H 2 0’ has
no clue to them. In his capacity as a logician, he now stands
on the brink of a precipice. He is tempted to believe that the
scientific discourse is the, written or printed words, and that
the spoken words are either simply this over again, or this
■plus something else, namely emotional expression. Good
logic or good literature would save him; good logic, by
calling his attention to the fact that even the logical structure
of a proposition is not always clear from its written or printed
form 1 ; good literature, because one great part of a writer’s
skill consists in so framing his sentences that an ordinarily
intelligent reader cannot make nonsense of them by reading
them, aloud or to himself, with the wrong intonation or
tempo. Failing these helps, and misled by the modern
practice of silent reading, logicians fling themselves head-
long in hordes, like lemmings; and suicidally discuss the
import of ‘propositions’ such as ‘the king of Utopia died
last Sunday’, without stopping to ask: ‘In what tone of voice

1 Cook Wilson used to point out in his lectures that the written sentence
‘That building is the Bodleian’ indifferently represents two quite different
propositions, 'That building is the Bodleian’ (answering the question, ‘Which
of these is the Bodleian ?’) and ‘That building is the Bodleian' (answering the
question ‘What is that building ?’). Cf. Statement and Inference , pp. 1 17-1 8.

266 LANGUAGE

am I supposed to say this ? The tone of a person beginning
a fairy tale, in which case I hand the job over to an aestheti-
cian ; or the tone of a person stating a fact of which he wishes
to convince his audience, in which case it is a job for an
alienist; or the tone of a person merely making noises with
his mouth which may interest a physiologist but do not
interest me; or the tone of a person trying to pull a logician’s
leg, in which case solvuntur risu tabulae ?’ If you don’t know
what tone to say them in, you can’t say them at all : they are
not words, not even noises.

‘The proposition’, understood as a form of words ex-
pressing thought and not emotion, and as constituting the
unit of scientific discourse, is a fictitious entity. This will be
easily granted by any one who thinks for a moment about
scientific discourse in its actual and living reality, instead of
thinking only about the conventional marks on paper which
represent or misrepresent it. But I now come to a second
and more difficult thesis.

I have been speaking hitherto as if discourse had two
functions, one to express thought, the other to express
emotion; and as if the misconception I want to remove were
the doctrine that scientific discourse or intellectualized
language has the first function without the second. I do
want to remove that misconception; but I want to go a good
deal farther. An emotion is always the emotional charge upon
some activity. For every different kind of activity there is
a different kind of emotion. For every different kind of
emotion there is a different kind of expression. Taking first
the broad distinction between sensation and thought, the
emotional charges upon sense-experience, felt as they are at
a purely psychical level, are psychically expressed by auto-
matic reactions. The emotional charges upon thought-
experiences are expressed by the controlled activity of
language. Taking next the distinction within thought of
consciousness and intellect, the emotions of consciousness
are expressed by language in its primitive and original form;
but intellect has its emotions too, and these must have an

LANGUAGE 367

appropriate expression, which must be language in its
intellectualized form.

Intellect has its own emotions. The excitement which
drove Archimedes from his bath naked through the streets
was not a mere generalized excitement, it was specifically
the excitement of a man who had just solved a scientific
problem. But it was even more definite than that. It was the
excitement of the man who had just solved the problem of
specific gravity. The cry of ‘Eureka’ which expressed that
emotion looks, when written down, exactly like the ‘Eureka’
of a man who has found his oil-flask; but to an attentive
listener it was assuredly very different. It announced not
just any discovery, but a scientific discovery. And if there
had been among the passers-by a physicist as great as
Archimedes himself, who had come to Syracuse in order to
tell Archimedes that he had discovered specific gravity, it is
not impossible that he might have understood the whole
thing, and burst from the crowd, shouting, ‘So have I !’

An extreme and fantastic case may serve to point the
principle. If it is once granted that intellectualized language
does express emotion, and that this emotion is not a vague
or generalized emotion, but the perfectly definite emotion
proper to a perfectly definite act of thought, the consequence
follows that in expressing the emotion the act of thought is
expressed too. There is no' need for two separate expressions,
one of the thought and the other of the emotion accom-
panying it. There is only one expression. We may say if we
like that a thought is expressed in words and that these same
words also express the peculiar emotions proper to it; but
these two things are not expressed in the same sense of
that word. The expression of a thought in words is never
a direct or immediate expression. It is mediated through
the peculiar emotion which is the emotional charge on the
thought. Thus, when one person expounds his thought in
words to another, what he is directly and immediately doing
is to express to his hearer the peculiar emotion with which
he thinks it, and persuade him to think out this emotion for

268 LANGUAGE

himself, that is, to rediscover for himself a thought which,
when he has discovered it, he recognizes as the thought
whose peculiar emotional tone the speaker has expressed.

§ 9. Language and Symbolism

We can now return to the distinction between language
and symbolism. A symbol is language and yet not language.
A mathematical or logical or any other kind of symbol is
invented to serve a purpose purely scientific; it is supposed
to have no emotional expressiveness whatever. But when
once a particular symbolism has been taken into use and
mastered, it reacquires the emotional expressiveness of
language proper. Every mathematician knows this. At the
same time, the emotions which mathematicians find ex-
pressed in their symbols are not emotions in general, they are
the peculiar emotions belonging to mathematical thinking.

The same applies to technical terms. These are invented
solely to serve the purpose of a particular scientific theory;
but as they begin to pass current in the scientist’s speech or
writing they express to him and to those who understand
him the peculiar emotions which that theory yields. Often,
when invented by a man of literary ability, they are chosen
from the first with an eye to expressing these emotions as
directly and obviously as possible. Thus, a logician may use
a term like ‘atomic propositions’ as part of his technical
vocabulary. The word ‘atomic’ is a technical term, that is,
a word borrowed from elsewhere and turned into a symbol
by undergoing precise definition in terms of the theory.
Sentences in which it occurs can be subjected to homo-
lingual translation. But, as we find it occurring in the
logician’s discourse, it is full of emotional expressiveness.
It conveys to the reader, and is meant to convey, a
warning and a threat, a hope and a promise. ‘Do not try
to analyse these; renounce the dream of analysing to
infinity; that way delusion lies, and the ridicule of people
like myself. Walk boldly, trusting in the solida simplicitas of
these propositions; if you use them confidently as bricks out

LANGUAGE 269

of which to build your logical constructions, they will never
betray you.’

Symbolism is thus intellectualized language: language, be-
cause it expresses emotions; intellectualized, because adapted
to the expression of intellectual emotions. Language in its
original imaginative form may be said to have expressiveness,
but no meaning. About such language we cannot distin-
guish between what the speaker says and what he means.
You may say that he means precisely what he says; or you
may say that he means nothing, he is only speaking (where
speaking, of course, means not making vocal noises, but
expressing emotion). Language in its intellectualized form
has both expressiveness and meaning. As language, it
expresses a certain emotion. As symbolism, it refers beyond
that emotion to the thought whose emotional charge it is.
This is the familiar distinction between ‘what we say' and
‘what we mean’. ‘What we say’ is what we immediately
express: the eager or reluctant or triumphant or regretful
utterance in which these emotions and the gestures or sounds
that express them are inseparable parts of a single experience.
‘What we mean’ is the intellectual activity upon which these
are the emotional charge, and towards which the words
expressing the emotions are a kind of finger-post, pointing
for ourselves in the direction from which we have come, and
for another in the direction to which he must go if he wishes
to ‘understand what we say’, that is, to reconstruct for him-
self and in himself the intellectual experience which has led
us to say what we did.

The progressive intellectualization of language, its pro-
gressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into
a scientific symbolism, thus represents not a progressive
drying-up of emotion, but its progressive articulation and
specialization. We are not getting away from an emotional
atmosphere into a dry, rational atmosphere; we are acquiring
new emotions and new means of expressing them.

4436

T

BOOK III

THE THEORY OF ART

XII

ART AS LANGUAGE
§ i . Skeleton of a Theory

The empirical or descriptive work of Book I left us with the
conclusion that art proper, as distinct from amusement or
magic, was (i) expressive, (ii) imaginative. Both these terms,
however, awaited definition: we might know how to apply
them (that being a question of usage, or ability to speak not
so much English as the common tongue of European
peoples), but we did not know to what theory concerning the
thing so designated this application might commit us. It was
to fill this gap in our knowledge that we went on to the
analytical work of Book II. The result of that book is that
we now have a theory of art. We can answer the question:
‘What kind of a thing must art be, if it is to have the two
characteristics of being expressive and imaginative?’ The
answer is: ‘Art must be language.’

The activity which generates an artistic experience is the
activity of consciousness. This rules out all theories of art
which place its origin in sensation or its emotions, i.e. in
man’s psychical nature: its origin lies not there but in his
nature as a thinking being. At the same time, it rules out all
theories which place its origin in the intellect, and make it
something to do with concepts. Each of these theories,
however, may be valued as a protest against the other; for as
consciousness is a level of experience intermediate between
the psychic and the intellectual, art may be referred to either
of these levels as a way of saying that it is not referable to the
other.

The artistic experience is not generated out of nothing.
It presupposes a psychical, or sensuous-emotional, experi-
ence. By an illegitimate comparison with craft, this psychical
experience is often called its ‘matter’; and it is actually-
transformed, somewhat (but not exactly) as a raw material is

274 ART AS LANGUAGE

transformed, by the act which generates the artistic experi-
ence. It is transformed from sense into imagination, or from
impression into idea.

At the level of imaginative experience, the crude emotion of
the psychical level is translated into idealized emotion, or the
so-called aesthetic emotion, which is thus not an emotion pre-
existing to the expression of it, but the emotional charge on
the experience of expressing a given emotion, felt as a new
colouring which that emotion receives in being expressed*
Similarly, the psycho-physical activity on which the given
emotion was a charge is converted into a controlled activity of
the organism, dominated by the consciousness which controls
it, and this activity is language or art. It is an imaginative
experience as distinct from a merely psycho-physical one, not
in the sense that it involves nothing psycho-physical, for it
always and necessarily does involve such elements, but in the
sense that none of these elements survive in their crude state;
they are all converted into ideas and incorporated into an
experience which as a whole, as generated and presided over
by consciousness, is an imaginative experience.

This imaginative activity, as the activity of speech, stands in
a twofold relation to emotion. In one way it expresses an emo-
tion which the agent, by thus expressing it, discovers himself
to have been feeling independently of expressing it. This is the
purely psychical emotion which existed in him before he
expressed it by means of language, though of course it had
already its appropriate psychical expression by means of invol-
untary changes in his organism. In another way it expresses an
emotion which the agent only feels at all in so far as he thus
expresses it. This is an emotion of consciousness, the emotion
belonging to the act of expression. But these are not two quite
independent emotions. The second is not a purely general
emotion attendant on a purely general activity of expression,
it is a quite individual emotion attendant on the individual
act of expressing this psychic emotion and no other. It is thus
the psychic emotion itself, converted by the act of conscious-
ness into a corresponding imaginative or aesthetic emotion.

ART AS LANGUAGE 275

This no doubt sounds very dry and abstruse to a reader
who has not read, or has forgotten, the contents of the pre-
ceding chapters. To a reader who remembers the argument
of those chapters, it will be quite clear. Even so, it is, of
course, highly abstract. I will remedy that by proceeding
to apply it to certain particular problems.

§ 2. Art Proper and Art falsely so called

The aesthetic experience, or artistic activity, is the ex-
perience of expressing one's emotions; and that which
expresses them is the total imaginative activity called in-
differently language or art. This is art proper. Now, in so
far as the activity of expression creates a deposit of habits in
the agent, and of by-products in his world, these habits and
by-products become things utilizable by himself and others
for ulterior ends. When we speak of ‘using’ language for
certain purposes, what is so used cannot be language itself,
for language is not a utilizable thing but a pure activity. It
is something which in Chapter III, § 2, I described as art
(that is, language) ‘denatured’. Language in itself cannot
be thus denatured; what can be is the deposits, internal and
external, left by the linguistic activity: the habit of uttering
certain words and phrases; the habit of making certain kinds
of gesture, together with the kinds of audible noise, coloured
canvass, and so forth, which these gestures produce.

The artistic activity which creates these habits and con-
structs these external records of itself, supersedes and jetti-
sons them as soon as they are formed. We commonly express
this by saying that art does not tolerate cliches. Every
genuine expression must be an original one. However much
it resembles others, this resemblance is due not to the fact
that the others exist, but to the fact that the emotion now
being expressed resembles emotions that have been expressed
before. The artistic activity does not ‘use’ a ‘ready-made
language', it ‘creates’ language as it goes along. Once we
have got rid of a false conception of ‘originality’, no objection
to this statement arises from the fact that one linguistic

276 ART AS LANGUAGE

expression is often very like another. There is nothing in
creation which favours dissimilarity between creatures as
against similarity. But the by-products of this creative
activity, ready-made words and phrases, types of pictorial
and sculptural form, turns of musical idiom, and so forth,
can be ‘used’ as means to ends; and among these ends there
cannot be counted the expressing of emotion, because ex-
pression (unless art is after all a craft) cannot ever be an end
to which there are means.

Thus the dead body, so to speak, of the aesthetic activity
becomes a repertory of materials out of which an activity of
a different kind can find means adaptable to its own ends.
This non-aesthetic activity, in so far as it uses means which
were once the living body of art, galvanizing these into an
appearance of life which makes it seem as if their spirit had
after all not left them, is a pseudo-aesthetic activity. It is
not art, but it simulates art, and is thus art falsely so called.

In itself it is not art, but (because it uses means to a pre-
conceived end) craft. All craft, as we saw in Chapter II, § a,
is aimed ultimately at producing certain states of mind in
certain persons. Art falsely so called is, therefore, the
utilization of ‘language’ (not the living language which alone
is really language, but the ready-made ‘language’ which
consists of a repertory of clichis) to produce states of mind in
the persons upon whom these cliches are used.

These states of mind (since the activity we are considering
is an entirely reasonable one) are of course produced for a
sufficient reason. And they are produced with the consent
of the person who is being acted upon, so that in the last
resort it is he that is the judge of this reason. To whatever
kind of state of mind they belong, it must be (a) one capable
of being thus produced, (b) produced either as an end in
itself or as means to some further end.

(a) There is no way by which any one person can produce
in another either an act of will or an act of thinking. When
we say that one person ‘makes’ another think or act, we mean
at most that he holds out inducements to act in such a way;

ART AS LANGUAGE 277

but that will not do here. What one person can produce in
another is emotion.

( b ) If the emotion produced is one which the person in
whom it is produced welcomes for its own sake, that is, as
pleasant, the producing of it is amusement. If he welcomes
it as a means to some further end, that is, as useful, the
producing of it is magic.

These things are not bad art. They are merely something
else which may be and often is mistaken for it. The bipola-
rity in virtue of which an act of thought may be well done or
ill done (Chapter VIII, § 1) is a differentiation within that
activity itself, a dialectical relation or opposition belonging
to its own essential structure; it cannot be reduced to a
distinction between the activity in question and some other
activity. If one activity A is mistaken for another, B, the
making of the mistake testifies to a bipolarity in the act of
thought which thus mistakes it, but not to a bipolarity in B.
So a person who mistakes amusement for art is doing his
thinking badly, but that about which he makes the mistake
is not bad art. What he is doing is to mistake the cliches or
corpses of language used in this business for language itself.
The difference between the things thus confused is like the
difference between a living man and a dead man ; the differ-
ence between good art and bad art is like the relation between
two living men, one good and the other bad.

Nor are these things a kind of raw material out of which
art is made by infusing into them the spirit of the aesthetic
consciousness. I have said repeatedly that such an infusion
is always possible; but if we consider more closely what that
statement means, we shall see it to mean not that amusement
or magic is a precondition of art, but that a person engaged
in such occupations may, in addition to being engaged in
them, turn to the very different work of expressing the
emotions which an occupation of this kind gives him. If,
for example, a portrait-painter who has been asked to produce
a good likeness of a sitter, instead, or in addition, paints a
portrait expressing the emotions which the sitter arouses in

278 ART AS LANGUAGE

him, he will produce not a commercial portrait or pot-boiler,
but a work of art. As a pot-boiler, the picture cannot ever
become a work of art. It can only become a work of art by
ceasing to be a pot-boiler.

The point is important, because I have ventured to assert
that most of what generally goes by the name of art nowadays
is not art at all, but amusement. Now, a reader might very
well say: ‘This amusement art is surely, after all, only art at
a low level ; or at any rate, something containing in itself the
living germs of art. If we want to know, therefore, how to
escape from the situation described (for I admit the correct-
ness of the description) into one in which genuine art is being
produced, or produced more frequently and of higher quality,
the answer is that we must go ahead with our amusement trade
and insist on doing it better. Or, if amusement art does not
promise such development, let us concentrate on magical
art. Let us by all means cease to be merely amusing; let us
have instead an art designed to stimulate emotions valuable
for practical life; for instance, an art dedicated to the service
of communism. At the same time, let us insist on doing our
communistic art really well, and out of that endeavour we
shall find ourselves developing a new art properly so called.’

Such a reader would be simply cherishing illusions. He
would be in effect confusing the relation between art and not
art with the relation between good art and bad art. I say this
with no hostility whatever towards magical art in general, or
in particular towards an art inspired by the wish to inculcate
communistic sentiments. On the contrary, I have insisted
that magic is a thing which every community must have;
and in a civilization that is rotten with amusement, the more
magic we produce the better. If we were talking about the
moral regeneration of our world, I should urge the deliberate
creation of a system of magic, using as its vehicles such
things as the theatre and the profession of letters, as one
indispensable kind of means to that end. But that is not the
point in question. We are talking not about the necessity for
magic, but about whether magic, by some dialectic inherent

I

ART AS LANGUAGE 379

in itself, will develop, if heartily pursued, into art. The
answer is that it will not.

A certain confusion of mind on this subject is very com-
mon at the present time among persons who are anxious to
help in creating both a better art and a better political
system. In connexion with their desire for a better art, they
have rejected the notion, current in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, that what makes a work of art is
not its subject-matter, but its technical qualities, with the
corollary that a genuine artist should be quite indifferent
to his subject-matter, and should care about it only to the
extent of choosing one which will give him scope for a dis-
play of his artistic powers. As against this view', they hold
that no artist can produce a fine work of art whose subject-
matter he does not take seriously. On this they are absolutely
right. What they are saying is what I have said myself when
I said that the emotion expressed by a work of art cannot be
merely an ‘aesthetic emotion’, but that this so-called aesthetic
emotion is itself a translation into imaginative form of an
emotion which must pre-exist to the activity of expressing
it. It is an obvious corollary of this, that an artist who is
not furnished, independently of being an artist, with deep
and powerful emotions will never produce anything except
shallow and frivolous works of art.

It is clear, then, on my own premisses, that an artist with
strong political views and feelings will be to that extent
better qualified to produce works of art than one without.
But the question is, what is he to do with these political
views and feelings ? If the function of his art is to express
them, to make a clean breast of them, because unless he can
do this he cannot discover to himself or others what they are,
he will be turning them into art. But if he begins by knowing
what they are, and uses his art for the purpose of converting
others to them, he will not be feeding his art on his political
emotions, he will be stifling it beneath them. And by going
on to stifle it harder and harder he will not be getting nearer
to being a good artist. He will be getting farther away.

280 ART AS LANGUAGE

He may be doing good service to politics, but he will be

doing bad service to art.

There is only one condition on which a man can simul-
taneously do good service to politics and to art. It is, that the
work of exploring and expressing one’s political emotions
should be regarded as serviceable to politics. If there is any
kind of political order whose realization involves the use of
the muzzle, no one can serve that kind and at the same time
serve art.

§ 3. Good Art and Bad Art

The definition of any given kind of thing is also the
definition of a good thing of that kind: for a thing that is
good in its kind is only a thing which possesses the attributes
of that kind. To call things good and bad is to imply success
and failure. When we call things good or bad not in them-
selves but relatively to us, as when we speak of a good
harvest or a bad thunderstorm, the success or failure implied
is our own ; we mean that these things enable us to realize our
purposes, or prevent us from doing so. When we call things
good or bad in themselves, the success or failure implied is
theirs. We are implying that they acquire the attributes of
their kind by an effort on their own part, and that this effort
may be either more or less successful.

I am not raising the question whether it is true, as the
Greeks thought, that there are natural kinds, and that what
we call a dog is something that is trying to be a dog. For all
my present argument is concerned, either that view may be
true (in which case dogs can be good or bad in themselves),
or the alternative view may be true, that the idea of a dog is
only a way in which we choose to classify the things we come
across, in which case dogs can be good or bad only in relation
to us. I am only concerned with good and bad works of art.
Now, a work of art is an activity of a certain kind; the
agent is trying to do something definite, and in that
attempt he may succeed or he may fail. It is, moreover, a
conscious activity; the agent is not only trying to do some-

ART AS LANGUAGE 281

thing definite, he also knows what it is that he is trying to do;
though knowing here does not necessarily imply being able
to describe, since to describe is to generalize, and generaliz-
ing is the function of the intellect, and consciousness does
not, as such, involve intellect.

A work of art, therefore, may be either a good one or a
bad one. And because the agent is necessarily a conscious
agent, he necessarily knows which it is. Or rather, he neces-
sarily knows this so far as his consciousness in respect of this
work of art is uncorrupted; for we have seen (Chapter X, § 7)
that there is such a thing as untruthful or corrupt con-
sciousness.

Any theory of art should be required to show, if it wishes
to be taken seriously, how an artist, in pursuing his artistic
labour, is able to tell whether he is pursuing it successfully
or unsuccessfully: how, for example, it is possible for him to
say, ‘I am not satisfied with that line ; let us try it this way . . .
and this way . . . and this way . . . there! that will do.’ A
theory which pushes the artistic experience too far down the
scale, to a point below the region where experience has the
character of knowledge, is unable to meet this demand. It
can only evade it by pretending that the artist in such cases
is acting not as an artist, but as a critic and even (if criticism
of art is identified with philosophy of art) as a philosopher.
But this pretence should deceive nobody. The watching of
his own work with a vigilant and discriminating eye, which
decides at every moment of the process whether it is being
successful or not, is not a critical activity subsequent to, and
reflective upon, the artistic work, it is an integral part of that
work itself. A person who can doubt this, if he has any grounds
at all for his doubt, is presumably confusing the way an
artist works with the way an incompetent student in an art-
school works; painting blindly, and waiting for the master to
show him what it is that he has been doing. In point of fact,
what a student learns in an art-school is not so much to paint
as to watch himself painting: to raise the psycho-physical
activity of painting to the level of art by becoming conscious

2 8z ART AS LANGUAGE

of it, and so converting it from a psychical experience into an

imaginative one.

What the artist is trying to do is to express a given emotion.
To express it, and to express it well, are the same thing. To
express it badly is not one way of expressing it (not, for
example, expressing it, but not selon les regies ), it is failing to
express it. A bad work of art is an activity in which the
agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. This is
the difference between bad art and art falsely so called, to
which reference was made on p. 277. In art falsely so called
there is no failure to express, because there is no attempt at
expression ; there is only an attempt (whether successful or
not) to do something else.

But expressing an emotion is the same thing as becoming
conscious of it. A bad work of art is the unsuccessful attempt
to become conscious of a given emotion : it is what Spinoza
calls an inadequate idea of an affection. Now, a consciousness
which thus fails to grasp its own emotions is a corrupt or
untruthful consciousness. For its failure (like any other
failure) is not a mere blankness; it is not a doing nothing;
it is a misdoing something; it is activity, but blundering or
frustrated activity. A person who tries to become conscious
of a given emotion, and fails, is no longer in a state of sheer
unconsciousness or innocence about that emotion; he has
done something about it, but that something is not to express
it. What he has done is either to shirk it or dodge it: to
disguise it from himself by pretending cither that the emotion
he feels is not that one but a different one, or that the person
who feels it is not himself, but some one else : two alternatives
which are so far from being mutually exclusive that in fact
they are always concurrent and correlative.

If we ask whether this pretence is conscious or uncon-
scious, the answer is, neither. It is a process which occurs
not in the region below consciousness (where it could not,
of course, take place, since consciousness is involved in the
process itself), nor yet in the region of consciousness (where
equally it could not take place, because a man cannot literally

ART AS LANGUAGE 283

tell himself a lie; in so far as he is conscious of the truth he
cannot literally deceive himself about it); it occurs on the
threshold that divides the psychical level of experience from
the conscious level. It is the malperformance of the act which
converts what is merely psychic (impression) into what is
conscious (idea).

The corruption of consciousness in virtue of which a man
fails to express a given emotion makes him at the same time
unable to know whether he has expressed it or not. He is,
therefore, for one and the same reason, a bad artist and a
bad judge of his own art. A person who is capable of pro-
ducing bad art cannot, so far as he is capable of producing it,
recognize it for what it is. He cannot, on the other hand,
really think it good art; he cannot think that he has expressed
himself when he has not. To mistake bad art for good art
would imply having in one’s mind an idea of what good art
is, and one has such an idea only so far as one knows what it
is to have an uncorrupt consciousness; but no one can know
this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind,
so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity.

But nobody’s consciousness can be wholly corrupt. If it
were, he would be in a condition as much worse than the
most complete insanity we can discover or imagine, as that
is worse than the most complete sanity we can conceive. He
would suffer simultaneously every possible kind of mental
derangement, and every bodily disease that such derange-
ments can bring in their train. Corruptions of consciousness
are always partial and temporary lapses in an activity which,
on the whole, is successful in doing what it tries to do. A per-
son who on one occasion fails to express himself is a person
quite accustomed to express himself successfully on other
occasions, and to know that he is doing it. Through compari-
son of this occasion with his memory of these others, there-
fore, he ought to be able to see that he has failed, this time,
to express himself. And this is precisely what every artist is
doing when he says, ‘This line won’t do’. He remembers
what the experience of expressing himself is like, and in the

284 ART AS LANGUAGE

light of that memory he realizes that the attempt embodied
in this particular line has been a failure. Corruption of
consciousness is not a recondite sin or a remote calamity
which overcomes only an unfortunate or accursed few; it is a
constant experience in the life of every artist, and his life is
a constant and, on the whole, a successful warfare against it.
But this warfare always involves a very present possibility of
defeat; and then a certain corruption becomes inveterate.

What we recognize as definite kinds of bad art are such
inveterate corruptions of consciousness. Bad art is never the
result of expressing what is in itself evil, or what is innocent
perhaps in itself, but in a given society a thing inexpedient
to be publicly said. Every one of us feels emotions which,
if his neighbours became aware of them, would make them
shrink from him with horror: emotions which, if he became
aware of them, would make him horrified at himself. It is
not the expression of these emotions that is bad art. Nor is
it the expression of the horror they excite. On the contrary,
bad art arises when instead of expressing these emotions we
disown them, wishing to think ourselves innocent of the
emotions that horrify us, or wishing to think ourselves too
broad-minded to be horrified by them.

Art is not a luxury, and bad art not a thing we can afford
to tolerate. To know ourselves is the foundation of all life
that develops beyond the merely psychical level of experience.
Unless consciousness does its work successfully, the facts
which it offers to intellect, the only things upon which
intellect can build its fabric of thought, are false from the
beginning. A truthful consciousness gives intellect a firm
foundation upon which to build; a corrupt consciousness
forces intellect to build on a quicksand. The falsehoods
which an untruthful consciousness imposes on the intellect
are falsehoods which intellect can never correct for itself.
In so far as consciousness is corrupted, the very wells of truth
are poisoned. Intellect can build nothing firm. Moral ideals
are castles in the air. Political and economic systems are
mere cobwebs. Even common sanity and bodily health are

ART AS LANGUAGE 285

no longer secure. But corruption of consciousness is the same
thing as bad art.

I do not speak of these grave issues in order to magnify
the office of any small section in our communities which
arrogates to itself the name of artists. That would be absurd.
Just as the life of a community depends for its very existence
on honest dealing between man and man, the guardianship
of this honesty being vested not in any one class or section,
but in all and sundry, so the effort towards expression of
emotions, the effort to overcome corruption of consciousness,
is an effort that has to be made not by specialists only but by
every one who uses language, whenever he uses it. Every
utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a
work of art. It is important to each one of us that in making
them, however much he deceives others, he should not
deceive himself. If he deceives himself in this matter, he has
sown in himself a seed which, unless he roots it up again,
may grow into any kind of wickedness, any kind of mental
disease, any kind of stupidity and folly and insanity. Bad
art, the corrupt consciousness, is the true radix malorum.

4436

U

XIII

ART AND TRUTH
§ i. Imagination and Truth

If imagination were confused with make-believe, a theory
identifying art with imagination would seem to imply that
the artist is a kind of liar; a skilful, ingenious, pleasant, or
even salutary liar, perhaps, but still a liar. That confusion,
however, has already been repudiated.

If imagination were sufficiently described, as it was in
Chapter VII, § 4, as a form of experience which presents the
real and the unreal in a kind of undistinguished amalgam
or solution from which, later, the work of intellect is to
precipitate or crystallize the truth, art as imagination would
have a genuine and important function in human life; a
function analogous to that whereby a scientist envisages the
various possible hypotheses which later experiment and
observation will enable him to reject or raise to the level of a
theory. The business of art, on this view, would be to con-
struct possible worlds, some of which, later on, thought will
find real or action will make real.

There would be a good deal of truth in this view of art,
but it would still not be satisfactory. At the end of Book I we
were left with two functions characteristic of art proper: the
one imaginative, the other expressive. The view just stated
develops the first of these, but ignores the second. And it
develops the first in such a way that the second is, as it were,
disfranchised from the start. An imagination which con-
tented itself with constructing possible worlds could never
be at the same time an expression of emotion. For an
imaginative construction which expresses a given emotion is
not merely possible, it is necessary. It is necessitated by that
emotion ; for it is the only one which will express it.

The work of art which on a given occasion a given artist
creates is, that is to say, created by him not merely because

I

ART AND TRUTH 287

he can create it but because* he must. If we call it one only
out of a number of possible others each of which he might
have created instead, we are saying what is not true. He is
creating it at a certain point in his life, and he could not have
created it at any other point, nor any other at that point.
This is not because his works form a series in which each
depends on the one before and leads on to the one after; that
is a very superficial way of looking at the history of art,
whether on a large scale or a small ; it is because each is created
to express an emotion arising within him at that point in his
life and no other. His career as an artist is certainly one of
the things which have helped to bring him into that emotional
state, but only one.

If what an artist says on a given occasion is the only thing
which on that occasion he can say; and if the generative act
which produces that utterance is an act of consciousness, and
hence an act of thought; it follows that this utterance, so far
from being indifferent to the distinction between truth and
falsehood, is necessarily an attempt to state the truth. So
far as the utterance is a good work of art, it is a true utter-
ance; its artistic merit and its truth are the same thing.

This is often denied; but it is denied because of mis-
apprehension. We have distinguished two forms of thought:
consciousness and intellect. Now intellect is concerned with
the relations between things ; therefore intellect, since its truth
is a peculiar kind of truth, namely, a relational truth, has a
peculiar way of apprehending it, namely, arguing or inferring.
Consciousness as such, and therefore art as such, not being
intellect, does not and cannot argue. It cannot say, ‘this,
therefore that*, or, ‘this, therefore not that’. Now, if any one
thinks (we need not ask why) that intellect is the only possible
form of thought, he will think that whatever does not contain
arguments cannot be a form of thought, and therefore cannot
be concerned with truth. Observing that art does not argue,
he will infer that art has nothing to do with truth. A poet
will say at one time that his lady is a paragon of all the virtues ;
at another time that she has a heart as black as hell. At one

288 ART AND TRUTH

time he will say that the world is a fine place; at another,
that it is a dust-heap and a dunghill and a pestilent con-
glomeration of vapours. To the intellect, these are incon-
sistencies. A lady, we are told, cannot be a paragon of virtue
at one time and as black as hell at another; therefore a person
who says she is must be making it up. He cannot be telling
the truth; he must be dealing with appearances and not
realities ; emotions and not facts . 1

It is hardly worth while to refute this argument, by
pointing out that truthfulness about one’s emotions is still
truthfulness. A poet who is disgusted with life to-day, and
says so, is not saying that he undertakes to be still disgusted
to-morrow. But it is not any the less true that, to-day, life
disgusts him. His disgust may be an emotion, but it is a fact
that he feels it; the disgustingness of life may be an appear-
ance, but the fact of its appearing is a reality. And on the
poet’s behalf it may be replied, to some one who argues that
a lady cannot be both adorably virtuous and repellently
vicious, or that the world cannot be both a paradise and a
dust-heap, that the arguer seems to know more about logic
than he does about ladies, or about the world.

;Art is not indifferent to truth; it is essentially the pursuit
of truth. But the truth it pursues is not a truth of relation,
it is a truth of individual fact. The truths art discovers are
those single and self-contained individualities which from
the intellectual point of view become the ‘terms’ between
which it is the business of intellect to establish or apprehend
relations. Each of these individualities, as art discovers it,
is a perfectly concrete individual, one from which nothing
has yet been abstracted by the work of intellect., Each is an
experience in which the distinction between what is due to
myself and what is due to my world has not yet been made, v
If that experience consists in admiring a lady, I do not as
poet ask whether this happens because in herself she is

1 I am not ao much criticizing anybody else, as doing penance for youthful
follies of my own. See Outline of a Philosophy of Art (1925), p. 23 ; Speculum
Mentis (1924), pp. 59-60.

ART AND TRUTH 289

somehow different from other ladies, or because I am for
some reason in an admiring mood. I am doing something
quite different from asking such questions; I am discovering
a thing of the kind about which, later on, such questions may
have to be asked. If it turns out that we cannot answer them,
it will not follow that the things about which they are asked
were incorrectly observed.

§ 2. Art as Theory and Art as Practice

Art is knowledge; knowledge of the individual. It is not
on that account a purely ‘theoretical’ activity as distinct from
a ‘practical’. The distinction between theoretical and prac-
tical activities has, of course, a certain value, but it must not
be applied indiscriminately. We are accustomed to apply it,
and to find that it makes sense, in cases where we are con-
cerned with a relation between ourselves and our environ-
ment. An activity in ourselves which produces a change in
us but none in our environment we call theoretical ; one which
produces a change in our environment but none in ourselves
we call practical. But there are plenty of cases in which we
are either unaware of any distinction between ourselves and
our environment, or in which, if we are aware of it, we are
not concerned with it.

When we really begin to understand the problems of
morality, for example, we find that they have nothing to do
with changes we can produce in the world around us, our-
selves remaining unchanged. They have to do with changes
to be produced in ourselves. Thus, the question whether I
shall return a book to the man I borrowed it from, or keep it
and deny having borrowed it if he asks me to give it back,
raises no serious moral problem. Which of the two things
I shall in fact do depends on the kind of man I am. But the
question whether I shall be an honest man or a dishonest one
is a question that raises moral problems of the most acute
kind. If I find myself to be dishonest, and decide to become
honest, I am tackling, or setting out to tackle, a genuinely
moral difficulty. But if I solve this difficulty the result will

290 ART AND TRUTH

not be a change in myself only. It will involve changes in
my environment too; for out of the new character which I
shall acquire there will flow actions which will certainly to
some extent alter my world. Hence morality belongs to a
region of experience which is neither theoretical nor practical,
but both at once. It is theoretical because it consists in part
of finding things out about ourselves; not merely doing
things, but thinking what we are doing. It is practical
because it consists not merely of thinking, but of putting our
thoughts into practice.

In the case of art, the distinction between theory and prac-
tice or thought and action has not been left behind, as it has
in the case of any morality that deserves the name (I say
nothing of the petty moralities that often usurp it); that
distinction has not yet arisen. Such a distinction only
presents itself to us when, by the abstractive work of intellect,
we learn to dissect a given experience into two parts, one
belonging to ‘the subject’ and the other to ‘the object'. The
individual of which art is the knowledge is an individual
situation in which we find ourselves. We are only conscious
of the situation as our situation, and we are only conscious
of ourselves as involved in the situation. Other people may
be involved in it too, but these, like ourselves, are present to
our consciousness only as factors in the situation, not as
persons who outside the situation have lives of their own.

Because the artistic consciousness (that is, consciousness as
such) does not distinguish between itself and its world, its
world being for it simply what is here and now experienced,
and itself being simply the fact that this is here and now
experienced, its distinctive activity is properly neither theo-
retical nor practical. For a person cannot properly be said to
act either theoretically or practically except in so far as he
thinks of himself as so acting. To an observer, the artist
appears as acting both theoretically and practically; to himself,
he appears as acting in neither way, because either way of
acting implies distinctions which, as artist, he does not draw.
All that we, as aesthetic theorists, can do is to recognize

ART AND TRUTH 291

features in his activity which we should call theoretical,
and others which we should call practical, and at the same
time to recognize that for him the distinction does not
arise.

Theoretically, the artist is a person who comes to know
himself, to know his own emotion. This is also knowing his
world, that is, the sights and sounds and so forth which
together make up his total imaginative experience. The two
knowledges are to him one knowledge, because these sights
and sounds are to him steeped in the emotion with which he
contemplates them: they are the language in which that
emotion utters itself to his consciousness. His world is his
language. What it says to him it says about himself; his
imaginative vision of it is his self-knowledge.

But this knowing of himself is a making of himself. At
first he is mere psyche, the possessor of merely psychical
experiences or impressions. The act of coming to know him-
self is the act of converting his impressions into ideas, and so
of converting himself from mere psyche into consciousness.
The coming to know his emotions is the coming to dominate
them, to assert himself as their master. He has not yet, it
is true, entered upon the life of morality; but he has taken an
indispensable step forward towards it. He has learnt to
acquire by his own efforts a new set of mental endowments.
That is an accomplishment which must be learnt first, if
later he is to acquire by his own effort mental endowments
whose possession will bring him nearer to his moral ideal.

Moreover, his knowing of this new world is also the mak-
ing of the new world which he is coming to know. The world
he has come to know is a world consisting of language; a
world where everything has the property of expressing
emotion. In so far as this world is thus expressive or signi-
ficant, it is he that has made it so. He has not, of course,
made it ‘out of nothing*. He is not God, but a finite mind
still at a very elementary stage in the development of its
powers. He has made it ‘out of’ what is presented to him in
the still more elementary stage of purely psychical experience :

2 g 2 ART AND TRUTH

colours, sounds, and so forth. I know that many readers, in
loyalty to certain brands of metaphysic now popular, will
wish to deny this. It might seem advisable for me to consider
their denials, which are very familiar, and refute them,
which would be very easy. But I will not do this. I am
writing not to make converts, but to say what I think. If any
reader thinks he knows better, I would rather he went on
working out his own lines of thought than tried to adopt
mine.

To return. The aesthetic experience, as we look back at it
from a point of view where we distinguish theoretical from
practical activity, thus presents characteristics of both kinds.
It is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two
knowns and knowi igs being not yet distinguished, so that the
self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of lan-
guage whose meaning is that emotional experience which
constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions
which are known only as expressed in the language which is
the world. It is also a making of oneself and of one’s world,
the self which was psyche being remade in the shape of
consciousness, and the world, which was crude sensa, being
remade in the shape of language, or sensa converted into
imagery and charged with emotional significance. The step
forward in the development of experience which leads from
the psychic level to the level of consciousness (and that step
is the specific achievement of art) is thus a step forward both
in theory and in practice, although it is one step only and
not two; as a progress along a railway-line towards a certain
junction is a progress towards both the regions served by
the two lines which divide at that junction. For that matter,
it is also a progress towards the region in which, later, those
two lines reunite.

§ 3. Art and Intellect

Art as such contains nothing that is due to intellect. Its
essence is that of an activity by which we become conscious
of our own emotions. Now, there are emotions which exist

ART AND TRUTH 293

in us, but of which we are not yet conscious, at the level of
psychical experience. Therefore art finds in purely psychical
experience a situation of the type with which it essentially
deals, and a problem of the kind which its essential business
is to solve.

This might seem to be not only a problem such as art
exists to solve, but the only problem which it can solve. It
might seem, in other words, that psychical emotions are the
only emotions which art can express. For all other emotions
are generated at levels of experience subsequent to the
emergence of consciousness, and therefore (it might be
thought) under the eyes of consciousness. They are born,
it might seem, in the light of consciousness, with expressions
ready-made for them at birth. There can, therefore, be no need
to express them through works of art.

The logical consequence of this argument would be that
no work of art, if it is a genuine work of art, can contain in its
subject-matter anything that is due to the work of intellect.
This is not what I said in the first sentence of this section.
Art as such might contain nothing that is due to intellect, and
yet certain works of art might contain much that is due to
intellect, not because they are works of art, but because they
are works of a certain kind; that is, because they express
emotions of a certain kind, namely, emotions that can arise
only as the emotional charges upon intellectual activities.

Here, then, we have two alternatives. Either the subject-
matter of a work of art (that is, the emotion it expresses) is
drawn exclusively from the psychical level of experience,
because that is the only level at which there exists any
experience of which we are not conscious; or it may also
include elements drawn from other levels, in which case these
levels, too, will contain elements of which, until we find ex-
pression for them, we are not conscious.

If these two alternatives are considered in the light of the
question : what emotions do this and that work of art actually
express ? it will hardly be doubted, I think, that the second
alternative is right. If we examine almost any work of art

394 ART AND TRUTH

we like to choose, and consider what emotions it expresses,
we shall find that they include some, and those not the least
important, which are intellectual emotions : emotions which
can only be felt by an intellectual being, and are in fact felt
because such a being uses his intellect in certain ways. They
are the emotional charges not upon a merely psychical
experience, nor upon experience at the level of mere con-
sciousness, but upon intellectual experience or thought in
the narrower sense of the word.

And this, if we come to think of it, is inevitable. For even
if a certain emotion is, as I put it, endowed at birth with its
own proper expression, this is only a way of saying that the
work of expression has already been done in its case; and if
done, done by the artistic consciousness. And every emotion
is, if not born with the silver spoon of expression in its mouth,
at least reborn in that state on the occasion of its second birth
as idea, as distinct from impression. Since the emotional
life of the conscious and intellectual levels of experience is far
richer than that of the merely psychical level, therefore
(Chapter XI, § 3), it is only natural that the emotional sub-
ject-matter of works of art should be drawn mostly from
emotions belonging to these higher levels.

For example, Romeo and Juliet form the subject of a
play not because they are two organisms sexually attracted,
however powerfully, to each other; nor because they are
two human beings experiencing this attraction and con-
scious of the experience, that is, two human beings in
love; but because their love is woven into the fabric of
a complicated social and political situation, and is broken
by the strains to which that situation subjects it. The
emotion experienced by Shakespeare and expressed by
him in the play is not an emotion arising simply out of
sexual passion or his sympathy with it, but an emotion
arising out of his (intellectual) apprehension of the way in
which passion may thus cut across social and political condi-
tions. Similarly, Lear is envisaged, by Shakespeare and by
ourselves, not simply as an old man suffering cold and hunger,

ART AND TRUTH 295

but as a father suffering these things at the hands of his
daughters. Apart from the idea of the family, intellectually
conceived as a principle of social morality, the tragedy of
Lear would not exist. The emotions expressed in these plays
are thus emotions arising out of a situation which could not
generate them unless it were intellectually apprehended.

The poet converts human experience into poetry not by
first expurgating it, cutting out the intellectual elements and
preserving the emotional, and then expressing this residue;
but by fusing thought itself into emotion: thinking in a
certain way and then expressing how it feels to think in that
way. Thus Dante has fused the Thomistic philosophy into
a poem expressing what it feels like to be a Thomist. 1 Shelley,
when he made the earth say, ‘I spin beneath my pyramid of
night’, expressed what it feels like to be a Copernican. Donne
(and this is why he has become so congenial to ourselves in
the last twenty or thirty years) has expressed how it feels to
live in a world full of shattered ideas, disjecta membra of old
systems of life and thought, where intellectual activity is
itself correspondingly shattered into momentary figura-
tions of thinking, related to each other only by an absence
of all logical connexion, and where the prevailing emotional
tone of thought is simply the sense of this shatteredness : a
tone expressed over and over again in his poems, for example
in ‘The Glasse’, and in the shape of a moral idea by his many
verses in praise of inconstancy. And Mr. Eliot, in the one
great English poem of this century, has expressed his idea
(not his alone) of the decay of our civilization, manifested
outwardly as a break-down of social structures and inwardly
as a drying-up of the emotional springs of life.

I am not saying that every poet has a philosophical system,
and that his poetry expounds it. But my reason for refusing
to say this is not so much because it would be untrue as
because it would be misleading. What most people think
of as a philosophical system is a collection of doctrines
deliberately invented by an individual philosopher in the
1 Or however else one labels his (not wholly Thomistic) philosophy.

2 96 ART AND TRUTH

attempt to reduce the whole of his experience to private
formulae. I do not believe that such things exist. What I
find in the writings of any one philosopher is nothing like
that; it is more like a series of attempts to think, more clearly
and consistently than his contemporaries, in ways more or
less common to them all.

The poets share these ways of thinking, and express them
in their poetry. How then does this poetic expression of
them differ from their philosophical expression ? The
difference does not consist in the fact, if it is a fact, that the
poet writes or speaks in verse and the philosopher in prose.
Philosophers have written in verse, and have not on that
account been poets ; imaginative artists have written in prose,
and have been poets none the less. It does not consist in a
supposed distinction between the ‘emotive use of language’
and the ‘scientific’. We saw in an earlier chapter that any
such distinction is chimerical. It does not consist in a
distinction between language expressing emotion and lan-
guage expressing thought, for all language expresses emotion.
It does not consist in a distinction between language in its
original form, as expressing the emotions of consciousness,
and intellectualized language, as expressing intellectual
emotions; for, as we have just seen, the poet is under no
embargo on the expression of intellectual emotions; on the
contrary, these are what he normally expresses.

We shall come no nearer to a satisfactory distinction if
we think of the poet as merely imagining himself to conceive
ideas which if he were a philosopher he would be either
holding or rejecting in earnest. No doubt, there have been
people called artists who have thus dramatized themselves
into a kind of make-believe philosopher, posing to them-
selves as holding views which in fact they have not under-
stood. But these have not been artists proper. They belong
not to the aesthetic world of imaginative experience, but to
the pseudo-aesthetic world of make-believe. Dante was
perfectly in earnest with his Thomism, and Shelley with his
Copernicanism. And it is part of a philosopher’s business to

ART AND TRUTH 297

take up and think out hypothetically, accepting them
provisionally ‘for the sake of argument’, that is, in order to
find out what they involve, views which he need not either
accept or reject.

A more promising method of differentiating would be to
distinguish exposition from argument, as a static from a
dynamic aspect of thought. The business of St. Thomas
himself is not to expound Thomism, but to arrive at it: to
build up arguments whose purpose is to criticize other
philosophical views and by criticizing them to lead himself
and his readers towards what he hopes will be a satisfactory
one. Ever since Pythagoras (or so we are told) invented the
word philosophy, in order to express the notion of the philo-
sopher not as one who possesses wisdom but as one who
aspires to it, students of philosophy have recognized that the
essence of their business lies not in holding this view or that,
but in aiming at some view not yet achieved : in the labour
and adventure of thinking, not in the results of it. What a
genuine philosopher (as distinct from a teacher of philosophy
for purposes of examination) tries to express when he writes
is the experience he enjoys in the course of this adventure,
where theories and systems are only incidents in the journey.
For the poet, there is, perhaps, none of this dynamism of
thinking. He finds himself equipped, as it were, with certain
ideas, and expresses the way in which it feels to possess them.
Poetry, then, in so far as it is the poetry of a thinking man
and addressed to a thinking audience, may be described as
expressing the intellectual emotion attendant upon thinking
in a certain way: philosophy, the intellectual emotion atten-
dant upon trying to think better.

I do not know how else to distinguish the two, as species
of literary composition, except either by substituting pseudo-
philosophy for philosophy (or pseudo-poetry for poetry, or
both), or by using distinctions which I know to be false. But
the distinction I have stated is, I would insist, arbitrary and
precarious. I see no reason why the intellectual experience
of building up or criticizing a philosophical view should not

298 ART AND TRUTH

afford the poet a subject-matter no less fertile than that of
merely holding it. And I am sure that a philosopher who
expressed the experience of developing a view, without
making it clear to himself and his readers what view he was
developing, would be doing only half his work. The result
would seem to be that the distinction between philosophical
writing (and what I say applies equally to historical and
scientific writing) and poetical or artistic writing is either
wholly illusory, or else it applies only to a distinction between
bad philosophical writing and good poetic, or bad poetic and
good philosophical, or bad philosophical and bad poetic.
Good philosophy and good poetry are not two different kinds
of writing, but one; each is simply good writing. In so far
as each is good, each converges, as regards style and literary
form, with the other; and in the limiting case where each was
as good as it ought to be, the distinction would disappear.

This seems paradoxical only because we inherit a vicious
late nineteenth-century tradition according to which the
artist conceives himself as aloof from the general interests
and activities of his time, a member of a coterie whose only
concern is art for art’s sake. To writers suffering from that
delusion (which, as I showed in a previous chapter, arose from
the conception of art as amusement) there seems to be an
artistic way of writing, quite distinct from the inartistic way
adopted by scientists and philosophers and others outside
the coterie. But when once it is realized that art and language
are the same thing, this distinction vanishes. There can be
no such thing as inartistic writing, unless that means merely
bad writing. And there can be no such thing as artistic
writing; there is only writing.

To put this in terms of practice: we have got into the
habit of thinking that a writer must belong to one of two
classes. Either he is a ‘pure’ writer, concerned to write as
well as he can, in which case he is a literary man; or he is an
‘applied’ writer (to adapt the old distinction between pure
and applied science), concerned to express certain definite
thoughts, and anxious to write only well enough to make his

ART AND TRUTH 399

thoughts clear, and no better. This distinction must go.
Each of these ideals, if there is to be any future for literature,
must fertilize the other. The scientist and historian and
philosopher must go to school with the man of letters, and
study to write as well as writing can be done. The literary
man must go to school with the scientist and his likes, and
study to expound a subject instead of merely exhibiting a
style. Subject without style is barbarism; style without sub-
ject is dilettantism. Art is the two together.

XIV

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY
§ x. Extern alization

The work of art, as we have seen, is not a bodily or percep-
tible thing, but an activity of the artist; and not an activity of
his ‘body’ or sensuous nature, but an activity of his conscious-
ness. A problem arises out of this statement, concerning the
artist’s relation to his audience.

It seems to be a normal part of the artist’s work that he
should communicate his experience to other people. In order
to do that, he must have means of communication with them;
and these means are something bodily and perceptible, a
painted canvass, a carved stone, a written paper, and so forth.

On the technical theory of art, all this is quite simple. The
artist is an artist in so far as he succeeds in affecting his
audience in certain ways. The painted canvass or the like
is the means which he adopts to this end. The painted
canvass is in fact the work of art: the work of art is a bodily
and perceptible thing, and earns the title of work of art by
producing in the audience the desired result. The artist’s
relation to his audience is thus essential to his being an artist.

On the theory of art propounded in this book, this relation
to the audience seems at first sight to become inessential.
It seems to disappear altogether from the province of art as
such. If it still exists, it is due not to aesthetic considerations,
but to considerations of another kind. For art, on this theory,
is the expression of emotion, or language. Now language as
such is not necessarily addressed to any one. The artist as
such, therefore, is a person who talks or expresses himself,
and his expression in no way depends upon or demands the
co-operation of an audience. The audience would seem to
consist at best of persons whom the artist permits to overhear
him as he speaks. Whether anybody so overhears him or not
makes no difference to the fact that he has expressed his

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY 301

emotions and has therefore completed the work in virtue of
which he is an artist.

In order to round off this view, we must next ask: then
why does the artist take pains (as he admittedly does in
normal cases) to bring himself into relation with an audience ?
His motives are, ex hypothesis non-aesthetic : he does not do
it because otherwise his own aesthetic experience is incom-
plete; but they need not always be of one and the same kind.
In some cases he does it because, as a moral being, he desires
that other people should share an experience which he finds
so valuable; in some, because he must make a living. That
is to say, in relation to his audience he is either a missionary
or a salesman of the aesthetic experience.

This view seems at first sight, as I say, to be implied in
the theory of art as expression. Actually, it is inconsistent
with that theory: it is a relic of the technical theory. For
what the artist gives as missionary or sells as tradesman is not
an aesthetic experience, but certain bodily and perceptible
things: painted canvasses, carved stones, and the like; and
these things are given and taken, it is assumed, because they
have the power of evoking certain aesthetic experiences in a
person who contemplates them. It is further assumed that
the receiver cannot enjoy these experiences otherwise. They
are, that is to say, means, and indispensable means, to his
enjoyment of these experiences: and this is the technical
theory of art.

We are, in fact, assuming two different theories of aesthetic
experience, one for the artist, another for the audience. The
aesthetic experience in itself, we are assuming, is in both
cases a purely inward experience, taking place wholly in the
mind of the person who enjoys it. But this inward experience
is supposed to stand in a double relation to something out-
ward or bodily, (a) For the artist, the inward experience may
be externalized or converted into a perceptible object ; though
there is no intrinsic reason why it should be. ( 'h ) For the
audience, there is a converse process : the outward experience
comes first, and this is converted into that inward experience

4436 X

3 oz THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

which alone is aesthetic. But if the relation between inward
and outward is casual and fortuitous in («), how can it be
indispensable in ( 'b ) ? If the bodily and perceptible ‘work of
art’ is unnecessary to aesthetic experience in the case of the
artist, why should it be necessary to it in the case of the
audience ? If it can be in no way helpful to the one, how can
it be in any way helpful to the other ? Most serious of all, if
aesthetic experience in the artist is something wholly inde-
pendent of such outward things, but in the audience is some-
thing dependent upon them and derived from contemplation
of them, how is it an experience of the same kind in the two
cases, and how is there any communication ?

The view of the artist’s relation to his audience which I
have put forward in this section combines a technical theory of
art, where the audience is concerned, with a non-technical or
expressive theory for the case of the artist, and is therefore
inconsistent with itself. But the error lies deeper than this.
If the implications of the expressive theory had been com-
pletely grasped in the case of the artist, there would have
been no need to fall back upon the technical theory in dis-
cussing his relation with his audience. Our first problem,
therefore, concerns the artist. We must ask: what is the
relation between the artist’s aesthetic experience and the
painted canvasses, carved stones, and so forth, in which,
according to the view I have stated and criticized, he
‘externalizes’ it?

§ 2. Painting and Seeing

An artist who sits down in front of a subject and begins to
paint it is generally, like any one doing anything, acting
from very mixed motives. If he cannot give a short and
simple answer to the question, ‘Why are you painting that
subject?’ it is not because he is an unphilosophical person,
unaccustomed to analysing his own actions. It is because
there is no short and simple answer to give. In order to
get the question answered, we must define it much more
closely.

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY 303

We are not asking what led him to become, or leads him
to remain, a painter; we assume that he is one. We are not
asking why he chose that subject; we assume the subject
chosen. We are not asking him what he means to do with
the sketch when he has painted it; we assume that he cannot
decide until it is finished. We are not asking him whether he
gets an aesthetic experience from looking at his subject; we
assume that he would not be painting it unless he did. What
we are asking him about is the nature of the connexion that
exists between the fact of his getting an aesthetic experience
from looking at the subject and the fact of his painting it.
Our question, then, comes to this: ‘Are you painting that
subject in order to enable other people (including yourself on
a future occasion) to enjoy an aesthetic experience which,
independently of painting it, you get completely from just
looking at the subject itself; or are you painting it because
the experience itself only develops and defines itself in your
mind as you paint?’

Any artist who understood the terms of our question would
answer promptly and decidedly, ‘The second, of course’.
He would probably continue, if he felt disposed to talk, by
saying: ‘One paints a thing in order to see it. People who don’t
paint, naturally, won’t believe that; it would be too humi-
liating to themselves. They like to fancy that everybody, or at
least everybody of refinement and taste like themselves, sees
just as much as an artist sees, and that the artist only differs
in having the technical accomplishment of painting what he
sees. But that is nonsense. You see something in your
subject, of course, before you begin to paint it (though how
much, even of that, you would see if you weren’t already a
painter is a difficult question) ; and that, no doubt, is what
induces you to begin painting; but only a person with ex-
perience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how
little that is, compared with what you come to see in it as
your painting progresses. If you paint badly, of course, that
doesn’t happen. Your own daub comes between you and the
subject, and you can only see the mess you are making. But

3 04 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

a good painter — any good painter will tell you the same —
paints things because until he has painted them he doesn’t
know what they are like.’

Before we dismiss these observations as mere professional
conceit, we must bear in mind that when the painter talks of
seeing he is not referring to mere visual sensation. He does
not think that one’s eyes become sharper through the exercise
of painting. Seeing, in his vocabulary, refers not to sensation
but to awareness. It means noticing what you see. And
further: this act of awareness, as he is talking about it, in-
cludes the noticing of much that is not visual. It includes an
awareness of ‘tactile values’ or the solid shapes of things,
their relative distances, and other spatial facts which could be
sensuously apprehended only through muscular motion. It
includes, too, an awareness of things like warmth and cool-
ness, stillness and noise. In other words, it is a comprehensive
awareness of the kind which I described in Chapter VII,
§ 6, as a total imaginative experience.

What our painter is saying, then, comes to this. The
painted picture is not produced by a further activity upon
which he embarks, when his aesthetic activity has already
arrived at completion, in order to achieve by its means a non-
aesthetic end. Nor is it produced by an activity anterior to
the aesthetic, as means towards the achievement of aesthetic
experience. It is produced by an activity which is somehow
or other bound up with the development of that experience
itself. The two activities are not identical ; he distinguishes
them by the names of ‘painting’ and ‘seeing’ respectively;
but they are connected in such a way that, he assures us, each
is conditional upon the other. Only a person who paints well
can see well ; and conversely (as he would tell us with equal
confidence if we asked him) only a person who sees well can
paint well. There is no question of ‘externalizing’ an inward
experience which is complete in itself and by itself. There
are two experiences, an inward or imaginative one called
seeing and an outward or bodily one called painting, which
in the painter’s life are inseparable, and form one single

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY 305

indivisible experience, an experience which may be described
as painting imaginatively.

§ 3. The Bodily ‘ Work of Art'

In the preceding section we have only considered the
testimony of a painter, who (I need hardly say) is not an
imaginary character, concerning the relation between the
inward aesthetic experience and the outward activity of
painting. We have now to consider the relation which that
testimony bears to the general theory of art maintained in
this book.

In Chapter VII it was said that a work of art in the proper
sense of that phrase is not an artifact, not a bodily or per-
ceptible thing fabricated by the artist, but something existing
solely in the artist’s head, a creature of his imagination ; and
not only a visual or auditory imagination, but a total imagina-
tive experience. It follows that the painted picture is not
the work of art in the proper sense of that phrase. No reader,
I hope, has been inattentive enough to imagine that in the
preceding section this doctrine has been forgotten or denied.
What has been asserted is not that the painting is a work of
art, which would be as much as to say that the artist’s
aesthetic activity is identical with painting it; but that its
production is somehow necessarily connected with the
aesthetic activity, that is, with the creation of the imagina-
tive experience which is the work of art. What we are now
asking is whether, on our theory, there must indeed be such
a connexion.

The question can only be answered in the light of a general
theory of imagination and language. It was maintained in
Book II that a distinction exists between various ‘levels’ of
experience, two of which were respectively called the
psychical level and the conscious level. Each level, it was
said, presupposes the one below it, not in the sense that the
lower is left behind when the higher is reached, but in the
sense that the lower is related to the higher somewhat as a
raw material is related to something made out of it by

3 o 6 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

imposing upon it a new form. The higher thus contains the
lower within itself as its own matter, the special principles
of the higher being, as it were, a form according to which
this matter is now organized. By this reorganization the
lower is modified in certain ways. For example, the transi-
tion from the psychical level to the conscious level entails the
conversion of impressions, which are the elements of which
psychical experience consists, into ideas, or (which is the same
thing) of sensuous experience into imaginative experience.
What converts impressions into ideas, or sensation into
imagination, is the activity of awareness or consciousness . 1

If this is so, there can be no ideas without impressions;
for every idea is an impression which the work of conscious-
ness converts into an idea. The impression from which a
given idea is, as Hume puts it, ‘derived’, is not a past im-
pression degraded by mere passage of time into an idea;
it is a present impression elevated into an idea by the work of
consciousness. Wherever there is an idea, or imaginative
experience, there are also the following elements: (i) an
impression, or sensuous experience, corresponding with it;
(2) an act of consciousness converting that impression into
an idea. When the impression is said to correspond with the
idea, what is meant is that it is the impression which an act
of consciousness would convert into that idea and no other.

We get, therefore, this result. Every imaginative experi-
ence is a sensuous experience raised to the imaginative level
by an act of consciousness; or, every imaginative experience
is a sensuous experience together with consciousness of the
same. Now the aesthetic experience is an imaginative ex-
perience. It is wholly and entirely imaginative ; it contains no
elements that are not imaginative, and the only power which
can generate it is the power of the experient’s consciousness.
But it is not generated out of nothing. Being an imaginative
experience, it presupposes a corresponding sensuous experi-
ence; where to say that it presupposes this does not mean that
it arises subsequently to this, but that it is generated by the
1 For all this, see Chapter X, especially §§ 5, 6,

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act which converts this into it. The sensuous experience
need not exist by itself first. It may come into being under
the very eyes, so to speak, of consciousness, so that it no
sooner comes into being than it is transmuted into imagina-
tion. Nevertheless, there is always a distinction between what
transmutes (consciousness), what is transmuted (sensation),
and what it is transmuted into (imagination).

The transmuted or sensuous element in the aesthetic
experience is the so-called outward element: in the case under
examination, the artist’s psycho-physical activity of painting;
his visual sensation of the colours and shapes of his subject,
his felt gestures as he manipulates his brush, the seen shapes
of paint patches that these gestures leave on his canvass : in
short, the total sensuous (or rather, sensuous-emotional)
experience of a man at work before his easel. Unless this
sensuous experience were actually present, there would be
nothing out of which consciousness could generate the
aesthetic experience which is ‘externalized’ or ‘recorded’ or
‘expressed’ by the painted picture. But this sensuous ex-
perience, although it is actually present, is never present by
itself. Every element in it comes into existence under the
eyes of the painter’s consciousness; or rather, this happens
in so far as he is a good painter; it is only bad painters who
paint without knowing what they are doing; and every
element in it is therefore converted into imaginative experi-
ence at birth. Nevertheless, reflection distinguishes between
the imaginative experience and the sensuous experience out
of which it is thus made, and discovers that ‘nihil est in
imaginatione quod non fuerit in sensu’.

What of the case where a man looks at the subject without
painting ? He, too, has an aesthetic experience in so far as his
impressions are transmuted into ideas by the activity of his
imagination. But our artist was right to claim that there is
far less in that experience than in the experience of a man
who has painted the subject; for the sensuous elements
involved in merely looking, even where looking is accom-
panied by a smile of pleasure, gestures, and so forth, are

3 o8 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

necessarily much scantier and poorer, and also much less
highly organized in their totality, than the sensuous elements
involved in painting. If you want to get more out of an
experience, you must put more into it. The painter puts a
great deal more into his experience of the subject than a man
who merely looks at it; he puts into it, in addition, the whole
consciously performed activity of painting it; what he gets
out of it, therefore, is proportionately more. And this
increment is an essential part of what he ‘externalizes’ or
‘records’ in his picture: he records there not the experience
of looking at the subject without painting it, but the far
richer and in some ways very different experience of looking
at it and painting it together.

§ 4. The Audience as Understander

What is meant by saying that the painter ‘records’ in his
picture the experience which he had in painting it? With
this question we come to the subject of the audience, for the
audience consists of anybody and everybody to whom such
records are significant.

It means that the picture, when seen by some one else or
by the painter himself subsequently, produces in him (we
need not ask how) sensuous-emotional or psychical experi-
ences which, when raised from impressions to ideas by the
activity of the spectator’s consciousness, are transmuted into
a total imaginative experience identical with that of the
painter. This experience of the spectator’s does not repeat
the comparatively poor experience of a person who merely
looks at the subject; it repeats the richer and more highly
organized experience of a person who has not only looked at
it but has painted it as well. - '

That is why, as so many people have observed, we ‘see
more in’ a really good picture of a given subject than we do
in the subject itself. That is why, too, many people prefer
what is called ‘nature’ or ‘real life’ to the finest pictures,
because they prefer not to be shown so much, in order to
keep their apprehensions at a lower and more manageable

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level, where they can embroider what they see with likes and
dislikes, fancies and emotions of their own, not intrinsically
connected with the subject. A great portrait painter, in the
time it takes him to paint a sitter, intensely active in absorb-
ing impressions and converting them into an imaginative
vision of the man, may easily see through the mask that is
good enough to deceive a less active and less pertinacious
observer, and detect in a mouth or an eye or the turn of a
head things that have long been concealed. There is nothing
mysterious about this insight. Every one judges men by the
impressions he gets of them and his power of becoming
aware of these impressions; and the artist is a man whose
life’s work consists in doing that. The wonder is rather
that so few artists do it revealingly. That is perhaps because
people do not want it done, and artists fall in with their
desire for what is called a good likeness, a picture that
reveals nothing new, but only recalls what they have already
felt in the sitter’s presence.

How is any one to know that the imaginative experience
which the spectator, by the work of his consciousness, makes
out of the sensations he receives from a painting ‘repeats’,
or is ‘identical’ with, the experience which the artist had in
painting it? That question has already been raised about
language in general (Ch. XI, § 5) and answered by saying
that there is no possibility of an absolute assurance; the only
assurance we can have ‘is an empirical and relative assurance,
becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds,
and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other
to be talking nonsense’. The same answer holds good here.
We can never absolutely know that the imaginative experi-
ence we obtain from a work of art is identical with that of the
artist. In proportion as the artist is a great one, we can be
pretty certain that we have only caught his meaning partially
and imperfectly. But the same applies to any case in which
we hear what a man says or read what he writes. And a
partial and imperfect understanding is not the same thing as
a complete failure to understand.

3 io THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

For example, a man reading the first canto of the Inferno
may have no idea what Dante meant by the three beasts.
Are they deadly sins, or are they potentates, or what are they ?
he may ask. In that perplexity, however, he has not com-
pletely lost contact with his author. There is still a great deal
in the canto which he can understand, that is to say, trans-
mute from impression into idea by the work of his conscious-
ness; and all this, he can be fairly confident, he grasps as
Dante meant it. And even the three beasts, though he does
not understand them completely (something remains ob-
stinately a mere untransmuted impression) he understands
in part; he sees that they are something the poet dreads,
and he imaginatively experiences the dread, though he does
not know what it is that is dreaded.

Or take (since Dante may be ruled out as allegorical and
therefore unfair) an example from modern poetry. I do not
know how many readers of Mr. Eliot’s poem Sweeney among
the Nightingales have the least idea what precisely the situation
is which the poet is depicting. I have never heard or read any
expression of such an idea. Sweeney has dropped asleep
in a restaurant, vaguely puzzled by the fact that the Convent
of the Sacred Heart, next door, has reminded him of some-
thing, he cannot tell what. A wounded Heart, and waiting
husbandless women. As he snores all through the second
verse a prostitute in a long cloak comes and sits on his knees,
and at that moment he dreams the answer. It is Agamem-
non’s cry — ‘O, I am wounded mortally to the heart’ —
wounded to death at his homecoming by the false wife he
had left behind. He wakes, stretching and laughing (tilting
the girl off his knee), as he realizes that in the queer
working of his mind the hooded husbandless nuns and the
cloaked husbandless girl, waiting there like a spider for
her prey, are both Klytaemnestra, the faithless wife who
threw her cloak (the ‘net of death’) round her lord and
stabbed him.

I quote this case because I had known and enjoyed the
poem for years before I saw that this was what it was all

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY 31 :

about; and nevertheless I understood enough to value it
highly. And I am willing to believe that the distinguished
critic who thinks that the ‘liquid siftings’ of the nightingales
were not their excrement, but their songs, values it highly
too, and not everywhere so unintelligently as that sample
would suggest. 1

The imaginative experience contained in a work of art is
not a closed whole. There is no sense in putting the dilemma
that a man either understands it (that is, has made that entire
experience his own) or does not. Understanding it is always
a complex business, consisting of many phases, each com-
plete in itself but each leading on to the next. A determined
and intelligent audience will penetrate into this complex far
enough, if the work of art is a good one, to get something
of value; but it need not on that account think it has ex-
tracted ‘the’ meaning of the work, for there is no such thing.
The doctrine of a plurality of meanings, expounded for the
case of holy scripture by St. Thomas Aquinas, is in principle
perfectly sound : as he states it, the only trouble is that it does
not go far enough. In some shape or other, it is true of all
language.

§ 5. The Audience as Collaborator
The audience as understander, attempting an exact recon-
struction in its pwn mind of the artist’s imaginative experi-
ence, is engaged on an endless quest. It can carry out this
reconstruction only in part. This looks as if the artist were
a kind of transcendent genius whose meaning is always too
profound for his audience of humbler mortals to grasp in a
more than fragmentary way. And an artist inclined to give
himself airs will no doubt interpret the situation like that.
But another interpretation is possible. The artist may take
his audience’s limitations into account when composing his
work; in which case they will appear to him not as limitations

1 And it was not until a few days after I had written the above, that I
recognized ‘gloomy Orion’ as a borrowing from Marlowe’s Dido — another
tragedy about a husbandless woman.

312 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

on the extent to which his work will prove comprehensible,
but as conditions determining the subject-matter or meaning
of the work itself. In so far as the artist feels himself at one
with his audience, this will involve no condescension on his
part; it will mean that he takes it as his business to express
not his own private emotions, irrespectively of whether any
one else feels them or not, but the emotions he shares with his
audience. Instead of conceiving himself as a mystagogue,
leading his audience as far as it can follow along the dark and
difficult paths of his own mind, he will conceive himself as
his audience’s spokesman, saying for it the things it wants to
say but cannot say unaided. Instead of setting up for the
great man who (as Hegel said) imposes upon the world the
task of understanding him, he will be a humbler person,
imposing upon himself the task of understanding his world,
and thus enabling it to understand itself.

In this case his relation to his audience will no longer be a
mere by-product of his aesthetic experience, as it still was
in the situation described in the preceding section ; it will be
an integral part of that experience itself. If what he is trying
to do is to express emotions that are not his own merely, but
his audience’s as well, his success in doing this will be tested
by his audience’s reception of what he has to say. What he
says will be something that his audience says through his
mouth; and his satisfaction in having expressed what he feels
will be at the same time, in so far as he communicates this
expression to them, their satisfaction in having expressed
what they feel. There will thus be something more than
mere communication from artist to audience, there will be
collaboration between audience and artist.

We have inherited a long tradition, beginning in the late
eighteenth century with the cult of ‘genius’, and lasting all
through the nineteenth, which is inimical to this second
alternative. But I have already said that this tradition is
dying away. Artists are less inclined to give themselves airs
than they used to be; and there are many indications that
they are more willing than they were, even a generation ago,

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to regard their audiences as collaborators. It is perhaps no
longer foolish to hope that this way of conceiving the relation
between artist and audience may be worth discussing.

There are grounds for thinking that this idea of the
relation is the right one. As in § 2 , we must look at the facts;
and we shall find that, whatever airs they may give them-
selves, artists have always been in the habit of treating the
public as collaborators. On a technical theory of art, this is,
in a sense, comprehensible. If the artist is trying to arouse
certain emotions in his audience, a refusal on the part of the
audience to develop these emotions proves that the artist has
failed. But this is one of the many points in which the
technical theory does not so much miss the truth as misre-
present it. An artist need not be a slave to the technical
theory, in order to feel that his audience’s approbation is
relevant to the question whether he has done his work well
or ill. There have been painters who would not exhibit,
poets who would not publish, musicians who would not have
their works performed; but those who have made this great
refusal, so far as one knows them, have not been of the highest
quality. There has been a lack of genuineness about their
work, corresponding to this strain of secretiveness in their
character, which is inconsistent with good art. The man
who feels that he has something to say is not only willing
to say it in public : he craves to say it in public, and feels that
until it has been thus said it has not been said at all. The
public is always, no doubt, a circumscribed one: it may
consist only of a few friends, and at most it includes only
people who can buy or borrow a book or get hold of a theatre
ticket; but every artist knows that publication of some kind
is a necessity to him.

Every artist knows, too, that the reception he gets from
his public is not a matter of indifference to him. He may
train himself to take rebuffs with a stiff lip, and go on working
in spite of bad sales and hostile reviews. He must so train
himself, if he is to do his best work; because with the best
will in the world (quite apart from venality in reviewers and

3 14 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

frivolity in readers) no one enjoys having his unconscious
emotions dragged into the light of consciousness, and conse-
quently there is often a strongly painful dement in a genuine
aesthetic experience, and a strong temptation to reject it.
But the reason why the artist finds it so hard to train himself
in this way is because these rebuffs wound him not in his
personal vanity, but in his judgement as to the soundness of
the work he has done.

Here we come to the point. One might suppose that the
artist by himself is in his own eyes a sufficient judge of his
work’s value. If he is satisfied with it, why should he mind
what others think ? But things do not work like that. The
artist, like any one else who comes before an audience, must
put a bold face on it; he must do the best he can, and pretend
that he knows it is good. But probably no artist has ever been
so conceited as to be wholly taken in by his own pretence.
Unless he sees his own proclamation, ‘This is good’, echoed
on the faces of his audience — *Y es, that is good’- — he wonders
whether he was speaking the truth or not. He thought he
had enjoyed and recorded a genuine aesthetic experience,
but has he ? Was he suffering from a corruption of conscious-
ness ? Has his audience judged him better than he judged
himself?

These are facts which no artist, I think, will deny, unless
in that feverish way in which we all deny what we know to
be true and will not accept. If they are facts, they prove that,
in spite of all disclaimers, artists do look upon their audiences
as collaborators with themselves in the attempt to answer the
question : is this a genuine work of art or not ? But this is the
thin end of a wedge. Once the audience’s collaboration is
admitted thus far, it must be admitted farther.

The artist’s business is to express emotions ; and the only
emotions he can express are those which he feels, namely,
his own. No one can judge whether he has expressed them
except some one who feels them. If they are his own and no
one else’s, there is no one except himself who can judge
whether he has expressed them or not. If he attaches any

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importance to the judgement of his audience, it can only be
because he thinks that the emotions he has tried to express are
emotions not peculiar to himself, but shared by his audience,
and that the expression of them he has achieved (if indeed he
has achieved it) is as valid for the audience as it is for himself.
In other words, he undertakes his artistic labour not as a
personal effort on his own private behalf, but as a public
labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs.
Whatever statement of emotion he utters is prefaced by the
implicit rubric, not ‘I feel’, but ‘we feel’. And it is not
strictly even a labour undertaken by himself on behalf of the
community. It is a labour in which he invites the community
to participate; for their function as audience is not passively
to accept his work, but to do it over again for themselves.
If he invites them to do this, it is because he has reason to
think they will accept his invitation, that is, because he thinks
he is inviting them to do what they already want to do.

In so far as the artist feels all this (and an artist who did
not feel it would not feel the craving to publish his work,
or take seriously the public’s opinion of it), he feels it not
only after his work is completed, but from its inception and
throughout its composition. The audience is perpetually
present to him as a factor in his artistic labour; not as an
anti-aesthetic factor, corrupting the sincerity of his work by
considerations of reputation and reward, but as an aesthetic
factor, defining what the problem is which as an artist he is
trying to solve — what emotions he is to express — and what
constitutes a solution of it. The audience which the artist
thus feels as collaborating with himself may be a large one
or a small one, but it is never absent.

§ 6. Aesthetic Individualism

The understanding of the audience’s function as collabora-
tor is a matter of importance for the future both of aesthetic
theory and of art itself. The obstacle to understanding it is
a traditional individualistic psychology through which, as
through distorting glasses, we are in the habit of looking

3 16 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

at artistic work. We think of the artist as a self-contained
personality, sole author of everything he does : of the emo-
tions he expresses as his personal emotions, and of his
expression of them as his personal expression. We even
forget what it is that he thus expresses, and speak of his
work as ‘self-expression’, persuading ourselves that what
makes a poem great is the fact that it ‘expresses a great
personality’, whereas, if self-expression is the order of the
day, whatever value we set on such a poem is due to its
expressing not the poet — what is Shakespeare to us, or we
to Shakespeare? — but ourselves.

It would be tedious to enumerate the tangles of misunder-
standing which this nonsense about self-expression has
generated. To take one such only: it has set us off looking
for ‘the man Shakespeare’ in his poems, and trying to
reconstruct his life and opinions from them, as if that were
possible, or as if, were it possible, it would help us to
appreciate his work. It has degraded criticism to the level
of personal gossip, and confused art with exhibitionism.
What I prefer to attempt is not a tale of misdeeds, but a
refutation.

In principle, this refutation is simple. Individualism
conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-
sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and
to exhibit his nature in whatever works are appropriate to it.
But a man, in his art as in everything else, is a finite being.
Everything that he does is done in relation to others like
himself. As artist, he is a speaker; but a man speaks as he
has been taught; he speaks the tongue in which he was born.
The musician did not invent his scale or his instruments;
even if he invents a new scale or a new instrument he is only
modifying what he has learnt from others. The painter did
not invent the idea of painting pictures or the pigments and
brushes with which he paints them. Even the most pre-
cocious poet hears and reads poetry before he writes it.
Moreover, just as every artist stands in relation to other
artists from whom he has acquired his art, so he stands in

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relation to some audience to whom he addresses it. The
child learning his mother tongue, as we have seen, learns
simultaneously to be a speaker and to be a listener; he listens
to others speaking, and speaks to others listening. It is the
same with artists. They become poets or painters or musi-
cians not by some process of development from within, as
they grow beards; but by living in a society where these
languages are current. Like other speakers, they speak to
those who understand.

The aesthetic activity is the activity of speaking. Speech
is speech only so far as it is both spoken and heard. A man
may, no doubt, speak to himself and be his own hearer; but
what he says to himself is in principle capable of being said
to any one sharing his language. As a finite being, man
becomes aware of himself as a person only so far as he finds
himself standing in relation to others of whom he simultane-
ously becomes aware as persons. And there is no point in
his life at which a man has finished becoming aware of
himself as a person. That awareness is constantly being
reinforced, developed, applied in new ways. On every such
occasion the old appeal must be made: he must find others
whom he can recognize as persons in this new fashion, or he
cannot as a finite being assure himself that this new phase of
personality is genuinely in his possession. If he has a new
thought, he must explain it to others, in order that, finding
them able to understand it, he may be sure it is a good one.
If he has a new emotion, he must express it to others, in
order that, finding them able to share it, he may be sure his
consciousness of it is not corrupt.

This is not inconsistent with the doctrine, stated else-
where in this book, that the aesthetic experience or aesthetic
activity is one which goes on in the artist’s mind. The
experience of being listened to is an experience which goes
on in the mind of the speaker, although in order to its
existence a listener is necessary, so that the activity is a
collaboration. Mutual love is a collaborative activity; but
the experience of this activity in the mind of each lover taken

3 18 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

singly is a different experience from that of loving and being

spurned.

A final refutation of aesthetic individualism will, therefore,
turn on analysis of the relation between the artist and his
audience, developing the view stated in the last section that
this is a case of collaboration. But I propose to lead up to
this by way of two other arguments. I shall try to show that
the individualistic theory of artistic creation is false (i) as
regards the relation between a given artist and those fellow
artists who in terms of the individualistic theory are said to
‘influence’ him; (2) as regards his relation with those who are
said to ‘perform his works’ ; and (3) as regards his relation
with the persons known as his ‘audience’. In each case, I
shall maintain, the relation is really collaborative.

§ 7. Collaboration between Artists

Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine
artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own
work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions
expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must
his way of expressing them. It is a shock to persons labour-
ing under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s
plays, and notably Hamlet , that happy hunting-ground of
self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other
writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts
from the Gesta Romanorum ; that Handel copied out into his
own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo
of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing
the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that
Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the
works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beet-
hoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody
should be shocked. All artists have modelled their style
upon that of others, used subjects that others have used, and
treated them as others have treated them already. A work
of art so constructed is a work of collaboration. It is partly
by the man whose name it bears, partly by those from whom

p -

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he has borrowed. What we call the works of Shakespeare,
for example, proceed in this way not simply and solely from
the individual mind of the man William Shakespeare of
Stratford (or, for that matter, the man Francis Bacon of
Verulam) but partly from Kyd, partly from Marlowe,
and so forth.

The individualistic theory of authorship would lead to
the most absurd conclusions. If we regard the Iliad as a
fine poem, the question whether it was written by one man
or by many is automatically, for us, settled. If we regard
Chartres cathedral as a work of art, we must contradict the
architects who tell us that one spire was built in the twelfth
century and the other in the sixteenth, and convince our-
selves that it was all built at once. Or again : English prose
of the early seventeenth century may be admired when it is
original; but not the Authorized Version, for that is a trans-
lation, and a translation, because no one man is solely
responsible for it, cannot be a work of art. I am very willing
to allow with Descartes that ‘often there is less perfection in
works put together out of several parts, and made by the
hands of different masters, than in those at which one only
has worked’; but not to replace his ‘often’ by ‘always’. I am
very willing to recognize that, under the reign of nineteenth-
century individualism, good artists have seldom been willing
to translate, because they have gone chasing after ‘originality’ ;
but not to deny the name of poetry to Catullus’s rendering
of Sappho merely because I happen to know it for a trans-
lation.

If we look candidly at the history of art, or even the little
of it that we happen to know, we shall see that collaboration
between artists has always been the rule. I refer especially
to that kind of collaboration in which one artist grafts his
own work upon that of another, or (if you wish to be abusive)
plagiarizes another’s for incorporation in his own. A new
code of artistic morality grew up in the nineteenth century,
according to which plagiarism was a crime. I will not ask
how much that had to do, whether as cause or as effect, with

\

320 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

the artistic barrenness and mediocrity of the age (though it
is obvious, I think, that a man who can be annoyed with
another for stealing his ideas must be pretty poor in ideas, as
well as much less concerned for the intrinsic value of what
ideas he has than for his own reputation) ; I will only say that
this fooling about personal property must cease. Let painters
and writers and musicians steal with both hands whatever
they can use, wherever they can find it. And if any one
objects to having his own precious ideas borrowed by
others, the remedy is easy. He can keep them to himself by
not publishing; and the public will probably have cause to
thank him.

§ 8 . Collaboration between Author and Performer

Certain kinds of artist, notably the dramatist and the
musician, compose for performance. Individualism would
maintain that their works, however ‘influenced’, as the phrase
goes, by those of other artists, issue from the writer’s pen
complete and finished; they are plays by Shakespeare and
symphonies by Beethoven, and these men are great artists,
who have written on their own responsibility a text which,
as the work of a great artist, imposes on the theatre and the
orchestra a duty to perform it exactly as it stands.

But the book of a play or the score of a symphony, how-
ever cumbered with stage-directions, expression-marks,
metronome figures, and so forth, cannot possibly indicate in
every detail how the work is to be performed. Tell the
performer that he must perform the thing exactly as it is
written, and he knows you are talking nonsense. He knows
that however much he tries to obey you there are still
countless points he must decide for himself. And the author,
if he is qualified to write a play or a symphony, knows it too,
and reckons on it. He demands of his performers a spirit
of constructive and intelligent co-operation. He recognizes
that what he is putting on paper is not a play or a symphony,
or even complete directions for performing one, but only a
rough outline of such directions, where the performers, with

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY 321

the help, no doubt, of producer and conductor, are not only-
permitted but required to fill in the details. Every performer
is co-author of the work he performs.

This is obvious enough, but in our tradition of the last
hundred years and more we have been constantly shutting
our eyes to it. Authors and performers have found them-
selves driven into a state of mutual suspicion and hostility.
Performers have been told that they must not claim the status
of collaborators, and must accept the sacred text just as they
find it; authors have tried to guard against any danger of
collaboration from performers by making their book or their
text fool-proof. The result has been not to stop performers
from collaborating (that is impossible), but to breed up a
generation of performers who are not qualified to colla-
borate boldly and competently. When Mozart leaves it to
his soloist to improvise the cadenza of a concerto, he is in
effect insisting that the soloist shall be more than a mere
executant; he is to be something of a composer, and there-
fore trained to collaborate intelligently. Authors who try
to produce a fool-proof text are choosing fools as their
collaborators.

§ 9. The Artist and his Audience

The individualism of the artist, partly broken down by
collaboration with his fellow artists and still further by
collaboration with his performers, where he has them, is not
yet wholly vanquished. There still remains the most difficult
and important problem of all, namely, that of his relation to
his audience. We have seen in § 6 that this, too, must in
theory be a case of collaboration ; but it is one thing to argue
the point in theory, and quite another to show it at work in
practice. In order to do this, I will begin with the case where
the artist is a collaborative unit consisting of author and
performers, as in the theatre, and consider how, as a matter
of empirical fact, this unit is related to the audience.

If one wants to answer this question for oneself, the best
way to proceed is to attend the dress rehearsal of a play. In the

322 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

rehearsal of any given passage, scenery, lighting, and dresses
may all be exactly as they are at a public performance; the
actors may move and speak exactly as they will ‘on the night’ ;
there may be few interruptions for criticism by the producer;
and yet the spectator will realize that everything is different.
The company are going through the motions of acting a
play, and yet no play is being acted. This is not because there
have been interruptions, breaking the thread of the perfor-
mance. A work of art is very tolerant of interruption. The
intervals between acts at a play do not break the thread, they
rest the audience. Nobody ever read the Iliad or the Corn-
media at a sitting, but many people know what they are like.
What happens at the dress rehearsal is something quite
different from interruption. It can be described by saying
that every line, every gesture, falls dead in the empty house.
The company is not acting a play at all ; it is performing cer-
tain actions which will become a play when there is an
audience present to act as a sounding-board. It becomes
clear, then, that the aesthetic activity which is the play is
not an activity on the part of the author and the company
together, which this unit can perform in the audience’s
absence. It is an activity in which the audience is a partner.

Any one, probably, can learn this by watching a dress
rehearsal; but the principle does not apply to the theatre
alone. It applies to rehearsals by a choir or orchestra, or to
a skilled and successful public speaker rehearsing a speech.
A careful study of such things will convince any one who is
open to conviction that the position of the audience is very
far from being that of a licensed eavesdropper, overhearing
something that would be complete without him. Performers
know it already. They know that their audience is not
passively receptive of what they give it, but is determining
by its reception of them how their performance is to be
carried on. A person accustomed to extempore speaking,
for example, knows that if once he can make contact with
his audience it will somehow tell him what he is to say, so
that he finds himself saying things he had never thought of

THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY 323

before. These are the things which, on that particular
subject, he and nobody else ought to be saying to that
audience and no other. People to whom this is not a familiar
experience are, of course, common; but they have no business
to speak in public.

It is a weakness of printed literature that this reciprocity
between writer and reader is difficult to maintain. The
printing-press separates the writer from his audience and
fosters cross-purposes between them. The organization of
the literary profession and the ‘technique’ of good writing,
as that is understood among ourselves, consist to a great
extent of methods for mitigating this evil; but the evil is
only mitigated and not removed. It is intensified by every
new mechanization of art. The reason why gramophone
music is so unsatisfactory to any one accustomed to real
music is not because the mechanical reproduction of the
sounds is bad — that could be easily compensated by the
hearer’s imagination — but because the performers and
the audience are out of touch. The audience is not collabo-
rating, it is only overhearing. The same thing happens in the
cinema, where collaboration as between author and producer
is intense, but as between this unit and the audience non-
existent. Performances on the wireless have the same defect.
The consequence is that the gramophone, the cinema, and
the wireless are perfectly serviceable as vehicles of amuse-
ment or of propaganda, for here the audience’s function is
merely receptive and not concreative; but as vehicles of art
they are subject to all the defects of the printing-press in an
aggravated form. ‘Why’, one hears it asked, ‘should not
the modern popular entertainment of the cinema, like the
Renaissance popular entertainment of the theatre, produce
a new form of great art?’ The answer is simple. In the
Renaissance theatre collaboration between author and actors
on the one hand, and audience on the other, was a lively
reality. In the cinema it is impossible.

The conclusion of this chapter may be summarized
briefly. The work of artistic creation is not a work performed

1

324 THE ARTIST AND THE COMMUNITY

in any exclusive or complete fashion in the mind of the person
whom we call the artist. That idea is a delusion bred of
individualistic psychology, together with a false view of the
relation not so much between body and mind as between
experience at the psychical level and experience at the level
of thought. The aesthetic activity is an activity of thought
in the form of consciousness, converting into imagination an
experience which, apart from being so converted, is sensuous.
This activity is a corporate activity belonging not to any
one human being but to a community. It is performed not
only by the man whom we individualistically call the artist,
but partly by all the other artists of whom we speak as
‘influencing’ him, where we really mean collaborating with
him. It is performed not only by this corporate body of
artists, but (in the case of the arts of performance) by
executants, who are not merely acting under the artist’s
orders, but are collaborating with him to produce the
finished work. And even now the activity of artistic creation
is not complete; for that, there must be an audience, whose
function is therefore not a merely receptive one, but colla-
borative too. The artist (although under the spell of in-
dividualistic prejudices he may try to deny it) stands thus
in collaborative relations with an entire community; not an
ideal community of all human beings as such, but the actual
community of fellow artists from whom he borrows, execu-
tants whom he employs, and audience to whom he speaks.
By recognizing these relations and counting upon them in
his work, he strengthens and enriches that work itself; by
denying them he impoverishes it.

XV

CONCLUSION

The aesthetician, if I understand his business aright, is not
concerned with dateless realities lodged in some metaphysical
heaven, but with the facts of his own place and his own time.
These, at any rate, are what I have concerned myself with in
writing this book. The problems I have discussed are those
which force themselves upon me when I look round at the
present condition of the arts in our own civilization; and the
reason I have tried to solve them is because I do not see how
that condition (both of the arts and of the civilization to
which they belong) can be bettered unless a solution is
found. Our business, as I said before, is to cultivate our
garden; but gardens may get into such a state that they are
no longer cultivable without help from chemists and engineers
and other experts on whom, in happier times, the gardener
would look with a hostile eye.

My final question, then, is : how does the theory advanced
in this book bear upon the present situation, and illuminate
the path to be taken by artists in the immediate future ?

To begin by developing a general point already made in
the preceding chapter: we must get rid of the conception
of artistic ownership. In this sphere, whatever may be true
of others, lapropriite c’estle <vol. We try to secure a livelihood
for our artists (and God knows they need it) by copyright
laws protecting them against plagiarism; but the reason why
our artists are in such a poor way is because of that very
individualism which these laws enforce. If an artist may say
nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts,
it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take
what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and
Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were
free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might
be worth tasting.

326 CONCLUSION

This is a simple matter, and one in which artists can act
for themselves without asking help (which I am afraid they
would ask in vain) from lawyers and legislators. Let every
artist make a vow, and here among artists I include all such
as write or speak on scientific or learned subjects, never to
prosecute or lend himself to a prosecution under the law of
copyright. Let any artist who appeals to that law be cut by
his friends, asked to resign from his clubs, and cold-
shouldered by any society in which right-thihking artists
have influence. It would not be many years before the law
was a dead letter, and the strangle-hold of artistic individua-
lism in this one respect a thing of the past.

This, however, will not be enough unless the freedom so
won is used. Let all such artists as understand one another,
therefore, plagiarize each other’s work like men. Let each
borrow his friends’ best ideas, and try to improve on them.
If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting
it in the pages of an essay, let him re-write B’s poems and
publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with
Y’s this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing
it; not a sketch in Punchy but a full-sized picture for next
year’s Academy. I will not rely upon the banging com-
mittee’s sense of humour to the extent of guaranteeing that
they would accept it; but if they did, we should get brighter
Academy exhibitions. Or if he cannot improve on his
friends’ ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him
good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be
an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion?
Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat
each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or
Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of
copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times
could produce, I will not try to convert him.

Next, with regard to the arts of performance, where one
man designs a work of art and another, or a group of others,
executes it. Ruskin (who was not always wrong) insisted
long ago that in the special case of architecture the best work

CONCLUSION 327

demanded a genuine collaboration between designer and
executants: not a relation in which the workmen simply
carried out orders, but one in which they had a share in the
work of designing. Ruskin did not succeed in his project
of reviving English architecture, because he only saw his
own idea dimly and could not think out its implications,
which was better done afterwards by William Morris ; but
the idea he partly grasped is one application of the idea I
shall try to state.

In these arts (I am especially thinking of music and drama)
we must get rid, to put it briefly, of the stage-direction as
developed by Mr. Bernard Shaw. When we see a play
swathed and larded with these excrescences, we must rub
our eyes and ask : ‘What is this ? Is the author, by his own
confession, so bad a writer that he cannot make his intention
clear to his producer and cast without composing a com-
mentary on his play that makes it look like an edition for use
in schools? Or is it that producers and actors, when this
queer old stuff was written, were such idiots that they could
not put a play on unless they were told with this intolerable
deal of verbiage exactly how to do it ? The author’s evident
anxiety to show what a sharp fellow he was makes the first
alternative perhaps the more probable; but really there is no
need for us to choose. Whether it was the author or the
company that was chiefly to blame, we can see that such stuff
(clever though the dialogue is, in its way) must have been
written at a time when dramatic art in England was at its
lowest ebb.’

I am only using Mr. Shaw as an example of a general
tendency. The same tendency is to be seen at work in most
plays of the later nineteenth century; and it is just as con-
spicuous in music. Compare any musical score of the late
nineteenth century with any of the eighteenth (not, of course,
a nineteenth-century edition), and see how it is sprinkled with
expression-marks, as if the composer assumed either that he
had expressed himself too obscurely for any executant to
make sense of the music, or that the executants for whom

328 CONCLUSION

he writes were half-witted. I do not say that every stage-
direction in the book of a play, or every expression-mark in
a musical score, is a mark of incompetence either in the
author or in the performer. I dare say a certain number of
them are necessary. But I do say that the attempt to make a
text fool-proof by multiplying them indicates a distrust of his
performers 1 on the part of the author which must somehow
be got rid of if these arts are to flourish again as they have
flourished in the past. This cannot be done at a blow. It
can only be done at all if we fix our eyes on the kind of result
we want to achieve, and work deliberately towards it.

We must face the fact that every performer is of necessity
a co-author, and develop its implications. We must have
authors who are willing to admit their performers into their
counsels : authors who will re-write in the theatre or concert-
room as rehearsals proceed, keeping their text fluid while the
producer and the actors, or conductor and orchestra, help
to shape it for performance; authors who understand the
business of performance so well that the text they finally
produce is intelligible without stage-directions or expression-
marks. We must have performers (including producers and
conductors, but including also the humblest members of cast
and orchestra) who take an intelligent and instructed interest
in the problems of authorship, and are consequently de-
serving of their author’s confidence and entitled to have their
say as partners in the collaboration. These two results can
probably be best obtained by establishing a more or less
permanent connexion between certain authors and certain
groups of performers. In the theatre, a few partnerships of
this kind are already in existence, and promise a future for
the drama that must yield better work on both sides than
was possible in the bad old days (not yet, unfortunately, at
an end) when a play was hawked from manager to manager

1 If an y one says that these stage-directions are intended not for the theatre,
but for the reader, I still object to them on grounds arising out of the author’s
relation to his audience. I dare say Mr. Shaw thinks that it is not so much
the actors, as the public, that are fools. I shall show later on that this is no
better.

CONCLUSION 329

until at last, perhaps with a bribe of cash, it was accepted for
performance. But the drama or music which these partner-
ships will produce must in certain ways be a new kind of
art; and we must also, therefore, have audiences trained to
accept and demand it; audiences which do not ask for the
slick shop-finish of a ready-made article fed to them through
a theatrical or orchestral machine, but are able to appreciate
and enjoy the more vivid and sensitive quality of a perfor-
mance in which the company or the orchestra are performing
what they themselves have helped to compose. Such a
performance will never be so amusing as. the standard
West-end play or the ordinary symphony concert to an after-
dinner audience of the overfed rich. The audience to which
it appeals must be one in search not of amusement, but of art.

This brings me to the third point at which reform is
necessary: the relation between the artist, or rather the
collaborative unit of artist and performers, and the audience.
To deal first with the arts of performance, what is here
required is that the audience should feel itself (and not only
feel itself, but actually and effectively become) a partner in
the work of artistic creation. In England at the present time
this is recognized as a principle by Mr. Rupert Doone and
his colleagues of the Group Theatre. But it is not enough
merely to recognize it as a principle; and how to carry out
the principle in detail is a difficult question. Mr. Doone
assures his audience that they are participants and not mere
spectators, and asks them to behave accordingly; but the
audience are apt to be a little puzzled as to what they are
expected to do. What is needed is to create small and
more or less stable audiences, not like those which attend a
repertory theatre or a series of subscription concerts (for it
is one thing to dine frequently at a certain restaurant, and
quite another to be welcomed in the kitchen), but more like
that of a theatrical or musical club, where the audience are
in the habit of attending not only performances but re-
hearsals, make friends with authors and performers, know
about the aims and projects of the group to which they all

330 CONCLUSION

alike belong, and feel themselves responsible, each in his
degree, for its successes and failures. Obviously this can be
done only if all parties entirely get rid of the idea that the
art in question is a kind of amusement, and see it as a serious
job, art proper.

With the arts of publication (notably painting and non-
dramatic writing) the principle is the same, but the situation
is more difficult. The promiscuous dissemination of books
and paintings by the press and public exhibition creates a
shapeless and anonymous audience whose collaborative func-
tion it is impossible to exploit. Out of this formless dust
of humanity a painter or writer can, indeed, crystallize an
audience of his own; but only when he has already made
his mark. Consequently, it is no help to him just when
he most needs its help, while his artistic powers are still
immature. The specialist writer on learned subjects is in
a happier position; he has from the first an audience of
fellow specialists, whom he addresses, and from whom an
echo reaches him; and only one who has written in this way
for a narrow, specialized public can realize how that echo
helps him with his work and gives him th^ confidence that
comes from knowing what his public expects and thinks
of him. But the non-specialist writer and the painter of
pictures are to-day in a position where their public is as good
as useless to them. The evils are obvious; such men are
driven into a choice between commercialism and barren
eccentricity. There are critics and reviewers, literary and
artistic journals, which ought to be at work mitigating these
evils and establishing contact between a writer or painter and
the kind of audience he needs. But in practice they seldom
seem to understand that this is, or should be, their function,
and either they do nothing at all or they do more harm than
good. The fact is becoming notorious; publishers are ceasing
to be interested in the reviews their books get, and begin-
ning to decide that they make no difference to the sales.

Unless this situation can be altered, there is a real likeli-
hood that painting and non-dramatic literature, as forms of

CONCLUSION 331

art, may cease to exist, their heritage being absorbed partly
into various kinds of entertainment, advertisement, instruc-
tion, or propaganda, partly into other forms of art like drama
and architecture, where the artist is in direct contact with his
audience. Indeed, this has begun to happen already. The
novel, once an important literary form, has all but dis-
appeared, except as an amusement for the semi-literate. The
easel-picture is still being painted, but only for exhibition
purposes. It is not being sold. Those who can remember
the interiors of the eighteen-nineties, with their densely
picture-hung walls, realize that the painters of to-day are
working to supply a market that no longer exists. They are
not likely to go on doing it for long.

The rescue of these two arts from their threatened ex-
tinction, as arts, depends upon bringing them back into
contact with their audience. The kind of contact that is
required is a collaborative contact in which the audience
genuinely shares in the creative activity. It is, therefore, not
to be achieved by any improvement in salesmanship , 1 for
this assumes that the works of art are already complete before
being offered to the public, and that the audience’s function
is limited to understanding them.

In the case of literature, the only way which I can see of
establishing such contact is for authors to give up the idea
of ‘pure literature’, or literature whose interest depends not
on its subject-matter, but solely on its ‘technical’ qualities,
and write on subjects about which people want to read. This
does not mean turning away from art proper to amusement
or magic; for the kind of subjects about which I am thinking
does not consist of subjects chosen for their power of arousing
emotion, whether for discharge in the reading itself or for
discharge in the affairs of real life. They are subjects about
which people already have emotions, but obscure and

1 A good publisher may, however, help to establish the kind of contact
we are seeking, in so far as, instead of merely publishing what authors give
him, he tells them (as he should be able to do) what kind of books are wanted.
The best publishers already do a good deal of this, and writers who are not
too conceited to co-operate with them find it extremely valuable.

332 CONCLUSION

confused ones; and in wanting to read about these subjects
they are wanting to raise these emotions to the level of con-
sciousness, to become imaginatively aware of them.

For this reason (and this, too, will differentiate such litera-
ture from that of amusement and from that of magic) it is
not so much a question of the author’s ‘choosing’ a subject;
it is a question rather of his letting a subject choose him:
I mean, a question of his spontaneously sharing the interest
which people around him feel in a certain subject, and allow-
ing that interest to determine what he writes. By so doing,
he will have accepted the collaboration of his public from the
very inception of his work, and the public thus accepted as
collaborators will inevitably become his audience. Some
writers will regard this as a lowering of their artistic standard.
But that is only because their artistic standard is entangled
in a false aesthetic theory. Art is not contemplation, it is
action. If art were contemplation, it could be pursued by an
artist who constitutes himself a mere spectator of the world
around him, and depicts or describes what he sees. But, as
the expression of emotion and addressed to a public, it
requires of the artist that he should participate in his public’s
emotions, and therefore in the activities with which these
emotions are bound up. Writers are to-day beginning to
realize that important literature cannot be written without
an important subject-matter . 1 In that realization lies the
hope of a thriving literature yet to be written ; for the subject-
matter is the point at which the audience’s collaboration can
fertilize the writer’s work.

In the case of painting, the same line of advance is open;
but the prospect of its being exploited is less good. I write
chiefly for English readers and about conditions in England;
and it is notorious that English painting is traditionally far
less vigorous and far less securely rooted in the life of the
country than English literature. In painting, we have
hardly begun to emerge from the stupid welter of eccen-

1 Cf. Louis MacNiece, ‘Subject in Modern Poetry’, in Essays and Studies
by Members of the English Association , vol. xxii (1937), pp. 146-58.

CONCLUSION 333

tricities and ‘isms’ which marked the decay of individualistic
nineteenth-century art. I see no such tendency in English
painting to-day as I see in English writing, towards utilizing
the collaborative energies of the audience by painting sub-
jects which English people, or some large and important
section of them, want to see painted.

Nevertheless, painting in this country has improved a great
deal in recent years. The Royal Academy’s exhibition of
1937 testified to a degree of average competence in a large
number of exhibitors which was quite unthinkable ten years
ago. Something is certainly happening to English painting;
something not unworthy to be compared with what is happen-
ing to English literature. Each of them is ceasing to rely on
its amusement value to an audience of wealthy philistines,
and is substituting for that aim not one of amusement value
to an audience of wage-earners or dole-drawers, nor yet one
of magical value, but one of genuine artistic competence.
But the question is whether this ideal of artistic competence
is directed backwards into the blind alley of nineteenth-
century individualism, where the artist’s only purpose was to
express ‘himself’, or forwards into a new path where the
artist, laying aside his individualistic pretensions, walks as
the spokesman of his audience.

In literature, those who chiefly matter have made the
choice, and made it rightly. The credit for this belongs in
the main to one great poet, who has set the example by
taking as his theme in a long series of poems a subject that
interests every one, the decay of our civilization. Apart from
one or two trifles, Mr. Eliot has never published a line of
‘pure literature’. Looking back, one sees the whole of his
early verse as a succession of sketches and studies for The
Waste Land . 1 First with a gentle irony in Prufrock, pretend-
ing to be merely a minor poet with a disillusioned eye for

1 He has said it himself. The words ‘why then lie fit you’, at the end of
The Waste Land, introduce the passage in The Spanish Tragedy where
Hicronimo brings out the play he wrote ‘when in Tolledo there I studied’,
explaining that this youthful work will fit the present occasion (Act xv,
scene i).

4436

Z

33+ CONCLUSION

the emotions of others, then with deepening intensity in
Gerontion and growing savagery in the Sweeney poems, he
found himself (that self which to the outward eye seemed
arch-highbrow, another Henry James, steeped in literature
and innocent — as he was called by one who should have
known better — of public-spiritedness) by degrees shaping
his mouth to the tremendous howl of Marlowe’s Mephisto-
philis — ‘Why this is hell’.

The decay of our civilization, as depicted in The Waste
Land , is not an affair of violence and wrong-doing. It is not
exhibited in the persecution of the virtuous and in the
flourishing of the wicked like a green bay tree. It is not even
a triumph of the meaner sins, avarice and lust. The drowned
Phoenician sailor has forgotten the profit and loss; the rape
of Philomel by the barbarous king is only a carved picture,
a withered stump of time. These things are for remembrance,
to contrast with a present where nothing is but stony rubbish,
dead tree, dry rock, revealed in their nakedness by an April
that breeds lilacs out of the dead land, but no new life in the
dead heart of man. There is no question here of expressing
private emotions; the picture to be painted is not the picture
of any individual, or of any individual shadow, however
lengthened into spurious history by morning or evening sun ;
it is the picture of a whole world of men, shadows themselves,
flowing over London Bridge in the winter fog of that Limbo
which involves those who, because they never lived, are
equally hateful to God and to his enemies.

The picture unrolls. First the rich, the idle man and his
idle mistress, surrounded by all the apparatus of luxury and
learning; but in their hearts there is not even lust, nothing
but fretted nerves and the exasperation of boredom. Then
the public-house at night; the poor, no less empty-hearted:
idle recrimination, futile longing for a good time, barren
wombs and faded, fruitless youth, and an awful anonymous
voice punctuating the chatter with a warning ‘Hurry up
please it’s time’. Time for all these things to end; time’s
winged chariot, the grave a fine and private place, and mad

CONCLUSION 335

Ophelia’s good-night, the river waiting for her. And then
the river itself, with its memories of idle summer love-
making, futile passionless seductions, the lover whose vanity
makes a welcome of indifference, the mistress brought up to
expect nothing; with contrasting memories of the splendours
once created by Sir Christopher Wren, the pageantry of
Elizabeth, and Saint Augustine for whom lust was real and
a thing worth fighting.

Enough of detail. The poem depicts a world where the
wholesome flowing water of emotion, which alone fertilizes
all human activity, has dried up. Passions that once ran
so strongly as to threaten the defeat of prudence, the destruc-
tion of human individuality, the wreck of men’s little ships,
are shrunk to nothing. No one gives; no one will risk him-
self by sympathizing; no one has anything to control. We
are imprisoned in ourselves, becalmed in a windless selfish-
ness. The only emotion left us is fear: fear of emotion itself,
fear of death by drowning in it, fear in a handful of dust.

This poem is not in the least amusing. Nor is it in the
least magical. The reader who expects it to be satire, or an
entertaining description of vices, is as disappointed with it as
the reader who expects it to be propaganda, or an exhorta-
tion to get up and do something. To the annoyance of both
parties, it contains no indictments and no proposals. To the
amateurs of literature, brought up on the idea of poetry as a
genteel amusement, the thing is an affront. To the little neo-
Kiplings who think of poetry as an incitement to political
virtue, it is even worse; for it describes an evil where no one
and nothing is to blame, an evil not curable by shooting
capitalists or destroying a social system, a disease which has
so eaten into civilization that political remedies are about as
useful as poulticing a cancer.

To readers who want not amusement or magic, but
poetry, and who want to know what poetry can be, if it is to
be neither of these things, The Waste Land supplies an
answer. And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one
more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo

336 CONCLUSION

both entertainment-value and magical value } and draw a
subject-matter from its audience themselves. It must be
prophetic. The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he
foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his
audience, at risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own
hearts. His business as an artist is to speak out, to make a
clean breast. But what he has to utter is not, as the indivi-
dualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets.
As spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter
are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no com-
munity altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this
knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject
concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils
which come from that ignorance the poet as prophet
suggests no remedy, because he has already given one.
The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s
medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of
consciousness.

INDEX

abstract thought, 254.

Academy, Royal, 32 6, 333.
accidence, 2 56.
acquaintance, 169-70.
actio : passia, 219.
activity : passivity, 196.

Addison, J., 138.
advertisement, 32-3.

Aeschylus, 98.

aesthetic emotion, see emotion,
aesthetics, business of, 325.
Agamemnon, 310.
agreement, 158.
agricultural depression, xc 2.

Alexander, S., 149, 17 6, 205.

Allen, Grant, 127.
ambiguity, 7.
amphitheatre, 97, 99.
amusement, what, 32, 78, 277.

— psychology of, 51-2.

— art, ch. v, passim.

among late nineteenth-century

aesthetes, 70.

Plato’s attack on, 49 seqq.

Aristotle’s defence of, 51, 114.

— its relation to magic: resemblance
and difference, 65, 79.

— mixture of, with magic, 82.

— : enjoyment, 94.

— : recreation, 95.

— when a danger to practical life, 95.

— history of, in Europe, 97 seqq.

— not able to develop into art, 278.
analogical meanings, 8-9.
analysis, grammatical, 254 seqq.

— logical, 26 r, seqq.
analytic thought, 253.
anger, xxo.

anthropology, cultural : physical, 242.
‘aphrodisiac civilization’ (Bergson), 86.
‘appeal* to sensa, the, 170.

‘appearances*, 190-2.

‘applied* literature, 298.

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 297, 311.
archaic Greek art, 49.

‘archetypes* of ideas (Locke), 177, 183.
Archimedes, 267,
architecture, 326-7.

Aristotle on the philosophy of craft, 1 7,2 5.

Aristotle (contd.)

— on poet-craft, Z8-X9.

— -his Poetics , 30, 50-x, 1x4.

— on ‘beauty’, 38.

— on representation, 43, 50, 114.

of the universal, 46.

— his defence of amusement art, 98.

— on aOvam? tSv £vcxvt{wv, ir6 n.

— on reproduction, 129.

— on imagination, 171, 198.

— on t6 frrl t6 ttoXO, 185, 256.

— his logical writings, 259.

Arne, T. A., 318.

ars, 5, 15.

art-schools, the use of, 2 8f.
artifact = work of craft, 108, 132, 133.
artist, the, his relation to ‘ordinary*
men, 5, 1x7.

— as aesthetician, 3, 4.

‘attack on art’, Plato’s alleged, 46

^ 77 -

attention, 203 seqq., 222.

— distraction of, 217-18.

— negative, 217.

audience, relation of a speaker to,
iio-ii, 247 seqq.

— reproduction of speaker’s experience
in mind of, 1x8-19, 140.

— relation to artist: as ‘overhearing*,
300-2.

as ‘understanding’, 308-9.

as collaborating, 3x1-15, 321-4,

329-36.

Aurignacian art, 10, 77.

Austen, Jane, X2t.

Authorized Version, the, 319.
awareness, 222.

Ayer, A. J., 201 n.

Azande, the, 8 n.

Aztec society, 96.

Bach, J» S*, 325*

Bacon, F., 319.

bad art, what it is not, 277.

— what it is, 280 seqq.
badness, what, 280.

Beardsley, A., 54.
beauty, 36 seqq.

— : utility, 37.

338 INDEX

beauty (contd)

— no connexion between art as such
and, 37-41.

— connected with admiration and
desire (epws), 38.

— non-aesthetic uses of the term are
normal and correct, 39.

— its misuse by aestheticians, 40, 91 n.,
149.

beaux arts % Its, 6.

‘because*, meaning of, x6 1.

Beethoven, L. van, 85, 123, 318, 320.
B6gouen, Count, 10.
behaviourism, 205, 244.
belle arti , le, 6.

Berenson, B., 146-7.

Bergson, H., 85, 263.

Berkeley, G., rejects Locke’s doctrine
that ‘all our simple ideas are real*,
176,183.

— distinguishes ‘ideas of sense* from
‘ideas of imagination*, 178.

— introspection theory of this distinc-
tion, 178-9, 195.

— relation theory of the distinction,
179—83.

— ‘laws of nature* in, 180-2, 190.

— theory that ‘ideas o( imagination’
are ‘wild*, 181-2.

— • ‘various colours variously disposed',
192.

— ‘force’ or ‘liveliness* of ideas of sense,
208.

— his theory of language, 226.
bifurcation of consciousness, 94.
biography, modern, neither art nor

history, 87.

bipolarity of thought, 157, 216, 277.
Blake, Vernon, X45.

‘blind* (Kant), 223 n.
bodies, statements about, 165-6.
Bosanquet, B., 46 n.
bowdlerization, 10 1.

— of imagination, 2x8-19.

Bradley, F. H., 259.

Brahms, J., 56.

Brangwyn, F., 144.

Breughel, P., 54.

Broad, C. D,, 18 x,

Brooke, Rupert, 244 n.

Brown, Baldwin, 10.

Buddha, 243-4.
bull-roarer, 66.

bullying, 87.

Burne-Jones, Sir E., 120.

cadenza, 321.

Carritt, E. F., 149.

Cartesians, 177, 187-8.
catharsis, 57, xxo.
cattishness, literature of, 87.

Catullus, 3x9.

Celtic art, 55.

— twilight, X20.

Cervantes, M., 87.

Cezanne, P., 144, 146.
charge, emotional, 78, 162-4.

Chartres, 319.

children, consciousness in, 208, 217.

— language in, 227, 236-7, 239-4./,
247 seqq .

— play in, 80.

Christianity, effect of on Roman art, 99.
church : state, a Renaissance distinc-
tion, 8.

cinema, thej amusement-art, 97, 102.

— as ‘fantasy*, 138.

— obstacles to developing genuine art
from, 4 323.

civilization, European, characteristics
of, r62.

cliches not language but the corpse of
language, 276-7.

‘dogs to dogs*, 10 1.

Coleridge, S. T., xi8.
collaboration, 311 seqq .
colour-symbolism, 162.
comedyj 48, ix6.

common-sense distinctions, value of,
172.

communication, 140, 249-50.
communism, 71, 278.
complex ideas (Locke), 176-7.
compulsion neurosis, 63-4.
concerto, as demanding collaboration
from soloist, 32 x.

Condillac, E. B. de, 20 x and n.
confused ideas (Leibniz), 176.
'conscious* : ‘unconsdous’, 204.
consciousness, 109, 1x3, 223.

— and self-consciousness, 248.

— freedom of, 207-8.

— modification of feeling by, 206 seqq,

— perpetuation of feding by, 223.

— relation of to imagination, 2x5.

— as a form of thought, 2x5-16.

INDEX 339

consciousness (contd.)

— as generating art, 273.

— bifurcation of, 94.

— corruption or untruth of, 217, 219,
220, 251, 282-5, 33 6 -

— emotions of, 232, 234, 274.
contagion, emotional, 230 seqq ,
content and form, 24.

context as affecting ‘meaning’, 258.
contradiction, 158.

Cook Wilson, 265 n.
copyright, law of, 325-6.
corroboration, 158.

corruption, see consciousness, corrup-
tion of.

Cotman, J. S., 144.
courtesy meanings, 3 , 9.
craft : art, 5, 9, 113, 117, 119*

— characteristics of, 15-17.

— philosophy of, 17.

— and art, overlap of, 22 n.j the same,
further explained, 277.

— theory of art as, 107-8, 139, t$i,
and see technical theory of art.

— making according to (i.e. fabrica-
tion), what, 133.

craftsman, 15 seqq .
creating, what, 128, 151.

— divine and human, 128-30.

— imaginative, 134.

— language : using it, 275.
criticism, what, 3, 88.

— impossible if art = representation,
88 seqq .

— relation of to artistic creation, 281.

— degradation of to personal gossip,
316.

critics, why they disagree, 89-90.

— their duty towards mechanized art,
33 °*

Croce, B., 46 n.

dance, the, as the ‘original’ language,
243-4, 246*

— patterns as representations of, 55.

— (modern) as magic, 75-6.

— music, 72.

D’Annunzio, G., 120.

Dante, 295-6, 310, 325.
dare, datum , 196.

‘data’ of sense, no such thing as, 169.
‘date’, to, a phrase of sham art-criti-
dsm, 91.

day-dreaming, 136, 138.
decoration, domestic, as magic, 72.
defecation, emotional, 51,* and see
catharsis.

definition, relation of to establishment
of usage, 2.

degree, differences of, 187.

‘denatured’ art, 34, 275.

— language, 275.

Descartes, R., on the problem of
imagination, 174-6, 187.

— on 'using the senses’, 205 and n.

— his ‘universal science’, 220.

— on unity of design, 319.
describing : expressing emotions, m-13.
desire, its relation to make-believe, 137.
detective stories, 85-6.

dinner party, ritual of, 76.
discharge of emotion, 78.
disease, its relation to corruption of
consciousness, 220, 283.

— moral, amusement as a, 95.
disowning of emotions, 216-18, 251-2.
dissociation, 219, 224.

distortion, formula of, 107,
domestication of feeling by conscious-
ness, 209.

domination of emotion, 235.

— of feeling, 222.

Donne, J., 295.

Doone, R., 329.

Dor6, G., 85.

dreams as make-believe, 136.

— : art, 138.

— illusory element in, 188.

— interpretation of, 193-4.
dress as language, 244 n.

dress rehearsal, what happens at, 321-2.
drugs, 96.

Dry den, J., 83.
dulcet 82.
duration, 159.

earthing of emotion (= catharsis), 79.
economic view of ‘art*, the, 19.
Education Act of 1870, the, 10 x.
Egyptian art as naturalistic and
magical, 10, 54, 77*

Eliot, T. S., Miss Sitwell on, 27.

— The Waste Land \ 295, 333-5.

— Sweeney among the Nightingales, 310.
Elizabethan drama, 85.
emergence, 233.

340 * INDEX

emotion, ‘art’ (= craft) as arousing,
3 r-a,

— as an end in itself (amusement), or
as a means (magic), 3a.

— catharsis of, 51-2.

— relation of magic to, 6 $-6.

— two phases of, the, 78.

— arousing of, 108.

— expression of, 109.

— dual expression of, 232-4*

— arousing : expressing, 113, 152.

— of sensation, 161-3, 266.

— of consciousness, 234, 2 66.

— of intellect, 266 seqq.

— Jamcs-Lange theory of, 232-3.

— disowning of, 216-18, 251-2.

— aesthetic, 115-17, 279,
emotional contagion, 230 seqq.
emotional charge on sensa, 162-3, 232,

2 66.

— on a mode of consciousness, 232, 266.

— on intellectual activities, 266-8.

— representation, 53 seqq.

— use of words, 9.

‘emotive use of language*, 262 seqq. t
29 6.

empirical thinking, 165, 167, 17m.
enjoyment : amusement, 94.

Enaor, R. C, K., 102 n.

epithets in poetry, why suspect, 112.

Ernulfus, curse of, 112.

2pa>S, 38, 40.

error as distortion of knowledge by
prejudice, 107.

— replacement of conception of illusion
by that of, 190.

— in consciousness as distinct from intel-
lect, how possible, 217.

not a bona fide ‘mistake', 219.

— consciousness liable to, 248.

‘eternal objects’, 159.

Euripides, 325.

European civilization, x62.
Evans-Prichard, E. E., 8.

‘execution’ of a plan, what, 132,
experience, knowledge derived from,
167.

— ‘independently of*, x68.

— sss imagination, 203.

— as including intellect, 212.
expression : arousing of emotion, 109,

152.

— ; betraying emotion, 121-4.

expression (corttd.)

— psychical, 228-34.

— imaginative (—language), 234-41.

— no emotion without, 238.

— dual, of certain emotions, 232-4.

— marks in music, 327-8.
external world, the, 166.

— imagination as factor in our know-
ledge of, 192.

fabrication, 125, 134.
facts, scientific appeal to, 105.
failure, implications of, 157.
fairy tales, 72.

‘families’ of sensa, 180-1.
fancy ass sensation (Hobbes), 175.

— = imagination (Locke), 200.
fantasies, 136, 138, 219.

‘fantastical ideas’ (Locke), 176-7.
fascism, 7r.

fear and amusement, 85.
feeling : thinking, 157-60, 163.

— the word applied to two sorts of
thing, 160.

— used in this book to designate the
‘psychical level of experience’, 164.

— as subject-matter of thought, 164.

— - ‘mnemic’, 201 n.

— conversion of into idea by conscious-
ness, 209.

fictions, 177, 254-5.

'figment*, 172.

‘fine art*, 6, 36.

finished product : raw material, 16,
flux of sensation, 159, 168-9, 210.
folk-art, 72, 10 1.
folk-songs, 88, 103.
football as amusement, 102.

— as magic, 73*
form and matter, 16.

no such distinction in art, 24.

‘form* in formalistic aesthetics, 142.
France, Anatole, 120.

Frazer, Sir J. G,, 58 n., 64.

Freud, S., 62, 64, 77 n., 127 n.
funeral, magical purpose of, 75-6.
‘furniture* of the mind (Locke) cannot
be made of sensa, 200, 203.

Galsworthy, J., 83.
games, children’s, 79-80.
generalizing representation, 45.

— description as, 112-13.

INDEX 341

‘genius*, 118, 312.

Gesta Romanorum , 318,

gesture, 245-7*

ghost stories, decline of, 85.

'given*, 169, 196.

God as craftsman, 18,

— as creator, 128-30,

Goethe, J. W. von, 127 n.
goodness, what, 280.

Graeco-Roman society, decay of, 96.
grammar, 254 seqq .

gramophone, the, why artistically un-
satisfactory, 323.

‘grand style*, the (Reynolds), 114,
Graves, R., 127 n.

Greek acting, 142.

— art, 77.

— — archaic, 97.

— attitude to art, 6 .

— decadence, 49.

— drama, 11.

— philosophy, 17-

— political experience, 8*

— world, decay of, 52.

Group Theatre, the, 329.

hallucinations, 179, 195.

Hamlet, 124.

Handel, G. F-» 3*8*

Hardy, T., 123,

health, its relation to consciousness, 284.
heart, sensa related to labouring of, 193.
hedonistic theory of art, 81.

Hegel, G. W. F., 312.

Heine, H., 23.

Hellenistic world, the, 52.

Henry V (Shakespeare), 124.

Hermes, sandals of (Homer), 38,
hierarchy of crafts, 25.
historical study, progress in, 106.
Hobbes, T,, 175-7 , 226.

Hocart, A. M., 73 n.

Holinshed, R., 318.

Homer, 38, 49.
homolingual translation, 260,

Horace, 19, 30, 82.

Hume, D., follows Berkeley in rejecting
the view that ‘all our simple ideas are
real*, 176.

— distinguishes ideas from impressions
by the introspection theory, 17 1,
182-7, *95> aoo-i, 212.

— how he differentiates them, 207-8.

Hume, D. (contd.)

— how ideas are ‘derived’ from impres-
sipns, 2 1 1, 306.

— means two different things by ‘im-
pression*, 213-14.

— inconsistent admission of, an, 184.

— his ‘science of MAN*, 185.

— ‘experience* for him means not
sensation but imagination, 203.

• — author of the Kantian theory of
imagination, 223.

— neglect of by contemporary philo-
sophers, 200-r, 2x4.

ideas (Locke), 200.

— simple : complex (Locke), 176-7.

— real : fantastical (Locke), X76-7.

— • : impressions (Hume), 171, 183 seqq,,
20 x seqq,

— (Spinoza), 176.

— clear and distinct (Spinoza), 219.
idealism, 255, 259.

idies fixes , 195.

‘idioms', 258.

‘illusion’, theatrical (a feature of amuse-
ment art), 79.

‘illusory sensa', 188-91, 194.

‘images’, 190-2.

imaginatio — sensation (Spinoza) , 176.
imagination, what, 202.

— theory of art as, 138.

— as somehow more ‘active* than
sensation, 195.

— relation of to consciousness, 215.

— as link between sense and under-
standing, 17 xj in Kant, 223.

— : intellect, 252.

— : make-believe, 135, 286 seqq ,

— bowdlerized, 218-19.

— confusion of sensation with, 200.

— ideas of (Berkeley), 178-83.
imaginary, 131, 152.

— colours, See., 173.

— sensa, what, 194,
imagining : really seeing, 172.
imitation : representation, 42.

— alleged instinct of, 240-1 .
‘impression’ (Hume), 171, 183 seqq,

— ambiguous, 213.

impressions : ideas, 202 seqq,, 222, 274,
283, 291, 306.

improper senses of words, iai.

‘impute* (Alexander), 149.

342 INDEX

inadequate ideas, 224.

Inca society, 96.

'inconsistency* in art, 287-8.
individual, the; knowledge of itself
prior to knowledge of its relations,
212-13.

— art is knowledge of, 288-9.
individualism, 3 1 5-24.
individualization a work of ait proper,

1 12.

individualized : generalized representa-
tion, 45.
inference, 261.
initiation-ceremonies, 66, 76.
inspiration, 126.

'instinct of imitation*, 240-1.
instruction, 'art* as, 32.
intellect, what, 216.

• — two forms of, 216.

— relation of attention to, 204.

— emotions of, 266 seqq., 293 seqq .

■ — art and, 292 seqq .

‘intellectuals*, 120.
intellectualized language, 225, 267.
intelligibility, 122.
interpretation, 205.
introspection, 205.

— theory of relation between sense and
imagination, 178-9, 195.

‘ivory towers’, 120-1.

Jame9, D. G., 34,

James, Henry, 334.

James-Lange theory of emotion, 232-3,
jazz, 56.

Jerome, J. K., 83.

Jonson, B., 22-3, 27, 82 n.
journalism as amusement art, 97.
Jowett, B., 46 m, 361,
judgement sss criticism, 89,

Jung, C. G., 127 n.

K<&OV, TO, 37.

Kant, I., 17 5, 259.

— on bird-song, 39.

— on painting, 145.

— on a priori knowledge, 167-8,

— on imagination and its function in
knowledge, X71, 192, 198, 223 n,

— on scientific method, 185.

— his discovery of second-order laws,
186.

— on the relation between the real and
the imaginary, 182, 187.

Kant, I. (< contd .)

wkeapais, 51, and see catharsis.

Kipling, R., 70, 245 n.

Kyd, T., 319.

language, what, 235-6,

— as expressive, 109.

— as imaginative, 225.

— art as, 273 seqq,

— the world as, 291.

— false reduction of a priori propo-
sitions to propositions about, 168,
201 n.

languages, plurality of, 241 seqq.

La T£ne art, 55.

Leibniz, G. W., 176, 187.

Leighton, Lord, iao.

Leonardo da Vinci, 127 n.

Levy-Bruhl, L., 61-4.
lexicographical units, 256, 260.
lexicography, 256.

Lewis, M. G., 85.
liberalism, 71.
lies, 219.

‘likeness* in portraiture, what, 52 -6,
listening : hearing, 204.
literal ; emotional representation, 53
seqq.

‘liveliness* of ideas, 178.

Locke, J., on children, idiots, and
savages, 59,

— on real and fantastical ideas, 176-
9 -

— on degrees of knowledge, 187 n,

— germs of introspection theory in,
I 77 » i 79 > i 95 ;

— as a materialist, 197.

— error about ‘simple ideas*, 200, 203.

— on language, 226.
logic, traditional, 259 seqq .
logical positivism, 201 n., 259.
looking : seeing, 203-4.

Lorrain, Claude, 318.

love, theory of, 38, 41.

Lowenfeld, M., 80 n.
lucidity, 122.

MacNieoe, L., 332 n.

Magdalenian art, 10, 77.
magic, what it is not: Tylor-Frazer
theory, 58 seqq.

— . — Levy-Bruhl’s theory, 60-3.

— — Freud’s theory, 62-4.

INDEX 343

magic (contd.)

— what it is, 32, 65-9, 277.

— -perversion of, 68.

— and amusement, relations of, 65, 79.

— — mixture of, 82 seqq.

— impossibility of genuine criticism if
art is confused with, 92-4.

— not able to develop into art, 278.
magical ‘art’, 49, 69 seqq .
make-believe as a feature of amusement,

79, Sx, 94*

— : imagination, 135-8, 152, 286, 296.

— as imagination working under the
censorship of desire, 137.

Malebranchc, N., 197, 198.
malice and amusement art, 87.
Malinowski, B., 61 n.

Malvolio, 87.

manual gesture, language of, 242-3.
Marlowe, C., 311 n., 319, 334.
marriage-ceremony, magical purpose
of, 75-6.

Marryat, F., 82.

Masaccio, 146-7.
masks worn by actors, 142,
material, see raw material,
materialism, 197.
matter and form, 16.

‘mean, what we', 7, 269.
meaning, Dante's theory of, 31 1.
means and ends, 15-17, 20-1, 34, 108,
xxi, 276.

mechanized ‘art', 323.
medieval art, 77, 97.

— philosophy, 175.
memory, 2x1, 254.

‘mentality', an occult entity, 60-2.
‘metaphysics', 198.
metaphysicians, 131.

micare digitzs, 242.

Michelangelo, 100, 325.

Middle Ages, beginning of, 99.

— magical character of art in, 70, 97,
military music, 72-3.

Milne, A. A., 83.
mirrors, 189.
misunderstanding, 251.

‘mnemic feelings', 201 n.

Moli&re, J. B. P. de, 62.

Monde oil l* on s’ amuse, /*, 97.

Monet, C., 146.

monkeys and typewriters, 126 n.
Moore, G. E., 198 n., 199 and n., 202 n.

morality not merely practical, 289.
Morris, William, 327.
motor hallucinations, 63.
motor sensations, 147.

Mozart, W, A., 85, 318, 321.
music, 245, 327-8.

— and gesture, 243.

— : sound, 139-40, 143, 151.

‘mystical* connexions (French sense),

60.

natural kinds, 280.

naturalism, what, 54.

nature, laws of (Berkeley), 180-2, 190.

— — sect *nd-order, 1 86-7.

— world of, 166.
necessity, art and, 286-7.
negroes, 8.
nco-Platonism, 129.
neurosis, 65.

Newman, E., 148.

Newton, Sir L, 176.

‘nothing, creation out of’, 129.
novels, popular, not art, 138.

— decay of, 331.

objective : subjective, 148-50,
objets d'art , 36, and see works of art.
obsolete meanings, 7, 9.
occult entities, 62-3,

Olympia, sculptures at, 52, 98.
opera, Wagner’s theory of, 25.
oppression, sense of, xio, 1x7.
orchestra, listening to, 143.
order, second, thoughts of the, 168,
186-7.

‘originals* of ideas (Locke), 183.
originality, 43, 275, 318-19.
‘overhearing’, audience as, xxx, 300,
overlap of art and craft, 22 n., 43, 277.

pageantry, social, its magical purpose,
74 -

pain as an element in aesthetic ex-
perience, 314.

painting not a ‘visual art*, 144 seqq.

— state of English, 332-3.
palaeolithic art, 9-10, 54.
panem et circenses, 97, 102,
part and whole, 15.
passio, 219.

passivity, 176.

‘patch, red', 203-4, 2x2,

344 INDEX

pattern-quality, 233.
patriotic art, 73.
petxifere (Spinoza), 17 6.
performers, relation of author to, 320
seqq,

perpetuation of sensa, 209, 212, 222.
persona , 248.
personality, 248, 317.

— - 'expression of*, 316.
perspective, 145 n., 1530.

‘philosophy* : ‘science*, 167.

— • as a literary form, 296-9.
photography, faking in, 53-

— ‘unlike* the original, 53 n., 54-5.
physical anthropology, 242.
physiology, appeal to, 178.
pianoforte, use of imagination in listen-
ing to the, 14a,

pictures, easel, decay of, 331.

Pindar, 48.

Pistol, 87, 124.
plagiarism, 319-zo, 324-6.
plan, what, 132-3.
planning, 15.

— absent from art, 21-2.
plane of the picture, 145, 153 n-
Plato, difficulty of understanding, 6.

— theory of justice detached from
theory of craft, 18.

— theory of creation subsumed under
theory of craft, 18.

— theory of art subsumed under
theory of craft, 18, 19, 30.

— theory of beauty connected not with
art but with love, 38.

— docs not regard all art as representa-
tive, 43.

— the myth about his attack on art,
46, 98.

— his attack on amusement art, 46-51,
103.

— historical context of this attack, 97-9.

— tragedy and comedy in Symposium y
116 n.

— 'lie in the soul’, 219 a.
play, 80.

Plutarch, 318.
plutocracy and art, 100.

Poc, E. A«, 54, 86*
poet-craft, 18, 27,
poetic a, ars, 5.

TrouyT 1x1*1 T^xvq, 5, 18.

*nr6Ais, what, 8.

Pope, A., 1 19.
pornography, 84.

portraiture as representation, 44, 52-4.

— as art, 45, 309.

• — ‘likeness* in, 53, 309.

— Roman, xx.

— Egyptian, ro-rr, 54, 77.
positivism, 58.

Praxiteles, 52.
preferability, logical, 261.

‘president of the immortals’ (Hardy),

123 -

Price, H. H., 1 80-1.

Price, Sir XJ., 145.
printing-press, the, 323, 330.
privacy, 157-8.
projection, 218.
proletariat, Roman, 99.
propaganda, 32-3.
prophecy, poetry as, 336.
propositions, 260, 265-6.
prose, 296.

Prospero, 6.
psyche, 164.

psychical expression, 228 seqq.

— level of experience, 164, iyx, 273*
psycho-analysis, 220.
psycho-analystB, 138.
psychological aesthetics, 29 seqq.> 81,

127, 151.

— laws, 181-2.

— terms, why not useful in poetry, 112.
psychology, 19, 17m.

— itB proper business, 164, 17m.

— its recognition of corrupt con-
sciousness and its effects, 218-19.

— its relation to physics, 182.

— the, of amusement art, 51*

— literature not to be taken as, 114.
puppets, 142.

‘pure* : ‘applied’ literature, 298.
puritanism, 100.

‘purging’ (catharsis) of emotion, 51.
puzzles as a form of 'art*, 32.
Pythagoras, 297.

Radcliffe, Mrs, A., 85.
rain-making, 68.
rainbow, 193.
ranting, 122-4.

Raphael, 146,

raw material in craft, *6.

— none in art, 22.

reaction, see stimulus.

‘real*, 174. ^

— imagination and the, 136.

- — and imaginary, representation

the, 45.

— things, 13 1.

— colours, &c., 173.

— ideas (Locke), 176-7,

— sensation, sensa, 173-4.
realistic aesthetics, 41, 149-51.
reality as a Kantian category, 1S6.
‘really seeing*, 172-3.

— there*, 172, 192.

‘reason* : ‘understanding’, 167.
recreation : amusement, 95.
reflection, ideas of (Locke), 184.
Reformation, the, its attitude towards

‘art*, 100.

refutation of a theory, the consequences
of, 106.

rehearsal, 321-2.
relations, 252-3,

— ‘between sensa*, 168-9, 198.
religion, relation to magic, 73.
religious art, 72,

Renaissance, its use of the word ‘art’, 6,

— its political consciousness, 8.

— — its aesthetic theory, 43.

— its art not a magical but an amuse*,
ment art, 70, 97.

— magical art surviving the, 72.

— Mr. Berenson’s study of its painting,
146.

— its anti-Aristotelianism, 259.

— its theatre, 323.
representation, art and, 42 seqq.

— literal and emotional, 53.

— degrees of, 54.

— criticism and, 88 seqq.

— generalizing, 114.

— distinctions according to effect
aimed at, intrinsic to, 116,

repression, 218, 224,
reproduction of speaker’s thought by
hearer, 140.
response, see stimulus,
reviewers, 313, 330.

Reynolds, Sir J., 45, 114.

Richards, I. A., 35, 127 n,, 225 n,, 26a
seqq.

‘ritual* in compulsion-neurosis, 64.
Roman Empire, 96, 102.

— portraiture, 11.

345

romanticism, 46.

Rostovtseff, M., 99 n.

Ruskin, J., 45-6, 326.

Russell, B., 180.

Sappho, 319.
satire, 87.

savages, study of, 57.

Savonarola, G., 100.

Sayers, Miss D. L., 86.
scholastic terms, 196.

‘science’ : ‘philosophy*, 167.

— of MAN (Hume*s), 185.

‘scientific use of language*, 262 seqq,,

296.

scientist, magician compared to, 58.
second order, thought of the, 168.
second-order laws of nature, 186-7.
selection, what, 56.

— none in art proper, 1 15.
self-assertion, 209, 222.
self-consciousness, 208-9, *4^.
self-deception, 219.
self-expression, 316.

Semon, E., 201 n.
sensa, see sensum.
sensation, 160,

— its relation to emotion, 161-2.

— as including imagination, 172.

— as excluding imagination, 173.

— confusion of, with imagination, 200.
— : attention, 203 .

— idea of (Locke), 184.

sense, ideas of (Berkeley), 178-83.
senses, deceitfulness of (Descartes), 175.
‘sense-data*, meaning of ‘data’ in, 196.

— ambiguity of term, 214.

— suggestio falsi in term, 169, 22 r.

— ‘world constructed out of, 214.
sensory hallucinations, 63.

sensual pleasure, art falsely identified
with, 141, 148.

sensum (sensa), current use of the term,
1635 criticism of, 169-70.

— how used in ch, ix, 173.

— ambiguity of the term, 214.

— false distinction between real and
imaginary, 194.

— ‘interpretation of, by thought*, 165,
* 93 -

— the above doctrine corrected, 215.

— ‘relations between*, 168-9, 198.

— the above doctrine corrected, 202.

INDEX

of

INDEX

346

sensum (sensa) (1 contd .)

— emotional charge on, 162.

— sterilization of, 162-3.
sentences, 257, 260.
sentimental literature, 88.
sexual desire as a basis of amusement-art,

84.

Shakespeare, W., 6, 87, 124, 126 n., 143,
* 94 > 3 e6 » 3^8, 3 * 9 > 32 °> 3 * 5 '
Shandy, Mr., 129.

Shaw, G. B., 82, 327—8.

Shelley, P. B., 295-6.
simple ideas (Locke), 176.
sincerity, 1x5.

Sisley, A., 146.

Sitwell, Mis9 E., 27.

Skeaping, J., 10.
skill, what, 28.

Slop, Dr., 1 12.

Smith, N. K., 223.
snobbery, literature of, 87-8.
societies, causes of death of, 96.

Socrates, 175 in Plato, 46 seqq .

‘soul*, 164.

— lie in the*, 219.

sound : music, 139-40, 143, 151.
speaking, see language.

— public, 322-3.

Spenser, E., 3x9.

Spinoza, B., 176, 2x9-20, 224, 232 n.,
282.

‘spirit* : ‘soul*, 164.
spontaneity of sensation, 197.
sport as magic, 73-4.
stage-directions, 327-8.
standard, bipolarity implied in a, 157.
state : church, 8.
sterilization of sensa, 162-3.
stimulus, reaction to, 81, in, 196.
‘strength* of ideas, what, 178.
Strindberg, 54.
subject-matter, 71, 279.
subject-predicate form, 259-60.
subjective-objective, 148-50,
success, 157.

Suetonius Tranquillus, C., 206.
surrealism a form of representation, 54.
syllogism, 261.

symbol, proper meaning of word, 55,
225.

— s=a artifact representing its original in
the second degree, 55.

— a word, 20 x tt.

symbolism = selective representation,
76 . .

— = intellectualized language, 225-6,
268-9.

‘sympathetic* magic, 59.
sympathy, 231, 248.
synonymity, 256.
syntax, 257.

‘tactile values*, 146-7, 243, 304.

— strictly motor rather than tactile,

147.

Tailor and Cutter , The, 35.

technical terms, 7-8, 268.

technical theory of art, 17, 105-8, 116,

148, 263, 301-2, 315.
technique, 26-9.

— no t. of expression, ixx.

5 » I 5 *

terms, usage of, 88.

Theatre, Roman, 97, 99.
theory, questions of, 105.

— : practice, 289 seqq .
thought : feeling, 157 seqq.

— primary form of, 164-6, 186.

— secondary form of, 166-8.

— bipolarity of, 2x6,

— consciousness aa a form of, 215.

— abstract, 254.

— analytic, 253.
thrillers, 85.

Tolstoy, L,, 264.
topography, sentimental, 88.
tragedy, 48, 51, 116.
transformation of a raw material, 16.
truth and consciousness, 2x6 seqq .

— and art, 286 seqq .

— of a proposition, never a sufficient
reason for asserting it, 264.

‘trying to* do something, what, 157.
towns, folk-art in, 102.

Turner, J. M. W., 46, 3x8.

Tylor, Sir E. B., 58 n., 64.

— his theory of magic, 58 seqq.
typewriters, monkeys and, 126 n.
typical, the, 46.

unconscious, the, what, 204.

— theories of art based on, 126.
‘understanding* i 'reason*, 167.

— by a hearer, 251.
unemployment, 102.

INDEX 347

uniforms, emotional effect of, 245 n.
universal, representation of the, 46.
unreal, imagination indifferent to dis-
tinction between real and, 1365 this
statement corrected, 286 segg.
untruthful consciousness, the, 219, 224,
282, and see consciousness, corrup-
tion of.

usage, questions of, 1-2, 88, 105.

— prior to questions of definition, 2.
useful arts : fine arts, 36.
using language : creating language, 275.
utile > 82.

values, see tactile values.

Van Gogh, V., 53 n.
verse, 296*

Vico, Giambattista, 80, 138.
violence, literature of, 87.
violin, 143.

'visual art*, painting not a, 144.
Vulgar, speaking with the*, 131, X74.

Wagner, R., 2$.
war dance, 66-7.

‘war poetry’, 123.

‘way’ of acting, what, 113,

Webster, J., 87.

‘wild’ sensa, 18 x, 186-7.

Wilde, O., 32, 70.

words, see ambiguity, definition, lan-
guage, terms, usage,
wireless, 102, 323.
work of art, what, 36-7,

— ambiguity of phrase, 139.

— = artifact or woxk of craft, 108, 146.

— as imaginary object, 139 segg,

«— the bodily, as necessary to aesthetic
experience, 305 segg.
writing, an incomplete notation for
speech, 243,

— ‘pure’ and ‘applied’, 298,
wrongdoing, its relation to corruption

of consciousness, 220.

Yeats, W. B., x2o.

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